NVIDIA Rolls Out Tegra 4i SoC With LTE

Besides announcing today announcing the most powerful graphics card in the world, the GeForce GTX TITAN, NVIDIA also announced the Tegra 4i. While part of the latest Tegra 4 generation of NVIDIA ARM SoCs and is their first product integrating an LTE processor, it's a bit of a disappointment.

The Tegra 4i is NVIDIA's product "first fully integrated 4G LTE mobile processor", which is nice with its i500 LTE modem. There's also 60 custom NVIDIA GPU cores found on this SoC. The disappointing part though is that the quad-core CPU is derived from ARM's R4 Cortex-A9 CPU. While a newer revision of the Cortex-A9, it's sad to see they went with the A9 and not the Cortex-A15. The A15 is used by the Tegra 4 "Wayne" SoC and the A15 has shown it's a hell of an upgrade over the A9. A dual-core A15 in some cases can even slaughter a quad-core A9.

Anyhow, the Tegra 4i has four ARM Cortex-A9 cores clocked at 2.3GHz plus a fifth battery-saving "companion" core. The vanilla Tegra 4 that is based on the Cortex-A15 also has 72 GPU cores over the 60 in this new LTE-integrated version. More details on the new NVIDIA ARM SoC can be found at NVIDIA.com.

Expect more Linux-related ARM/Mobile announcements this week with Mobile World Congress happening in Barcelona, Spain. We're just one hour away now from hearing the Ubuntu Tablet announcement.