Nvidia Unveils a new Tegra 4 Processor with LTE On-Board

As many of you already know by now Nvidia has unveiled its latest Tegra 4 processor last month during CES in Las Vegas, but the company in question hasn't been the only one to reveal new CPUs and shortly after the Nvidia conference, Samsung has also announced its 8-core Exynos 5 SoC and Qualcomm then joined the party with its Snapdragon 600 and 800 series.

Now Nvidia has announced a new chip which is still part of the Tegra 4 family. Dubbed the "Tegra 4i", the recently announced chip is a smaller version of its sibling and unlike the beefier version which is destined for "superphones and tablets", the 4i is meant to power up "smartphones". A bit vague but you get the idea. The 4i is a lower end chip (not "low-end" but "lower" than the Tegra 4). However, that doesn't mean it's not a powerful one and in fact it has its own perks.

While the Tegra 4 arrives with an "optional" LTE chip, the 4i comes with a new i500 LTE chip on-board. Furthermore, although the 4i features less GPU cores than its cousin (60 instead of 72), both processors arrive with a 4+1 core configuration. The difference however, is that while the Tegra 4 arrives with ARM Cortex-A15 cores, the 4i makes use of ARM Cortex-A9-r4 architecture. The frequencies also differ and where the 4 arrives with 1.9 GHz, the 4i is clocked at 2.3 Ghz.

Other dissimilarities between the two chip consist in the fact that the 4 supports 4GB of DDR3L and LPDDR3 memory, 4k (Ultra HD) HDMI and a display resolution of 3200 x 2000, whereas the 4i supports only 2 GB of LPDDR3 RAM, 1080p HDMI and an LCD resolution of 1920 x 1200.

As for when we'll get to see this LTE-enabled chip on the market, Nvidia claims that the Tegra 4i will most likely not going to be fitted on commercial devices until the end of the year.

The 4i is expected to be fully showcased during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where we'll most likely going to see what this particular chip is capable of.

Via: Android Central