In this age of rapid technological innovation, it is easy to become a little jaded and take things for granted. Take processing power for instance, which has become increasingly more complex, developing at a pace that even Moore would be astonished at. A blog post from NVIDIA today details just how hard the Tegra team worked on readying its amazing Tegra 4i for its appearance at MWC 2013 in February of this year. The Tegra 4i would be NVIDIA’s first microprocessor with a built-in modem, utilizing “soft modem” technology that the company acquired when it purchased Icera in 2011.
NVIDIA was tasked with optimizing the Tegra 4i in just 22 days, a feat that was by no means modest. NVIDIA gathered over 120 of its engineers from around the globe to their headquarters in sunny Santa Clara, and began work on their momentous task. The team toiled day and night, determined to make the Tegra 4i a reality. In almost no time, they had Linux booting on the system, and had added a touch screen input. A short time later the software modem sent a text message to NVIDIA’s CEO. The Tegra 4i, codenamed “Grey” was coming to life.
NVIDIA pulled it off, proudly displaying a working demo of their incredible Tegra 4i chip at MWC, which was housed inside a reference phone named “Phoenix,” thanks to the engineers and design team.
Tegra 4i chips are expected to be included in future budget and tablets, hopefully by the end of this year. The chip has 60 custom GPU cores, with a max clock speed of 2.3 GHz. The integrated modem technology allows the chip to support LTE and HSPA+, as well as a variety of other bands, allowing for extended battery life while utilizing a data connection.
One thing is for sure, NVIDIA has one heck of an engineering and design team, and will help define the development of mobile devices in the future. We can’t wait to see what they come up with next!
[Via: NVIDIA Blog] [Image: FanPop]