We still don’t have our first NVDIA Tegra 4 devices available yet, but the company has just announced a new part of the Tegra family, the Tegra 4i. The new SoC now has full Icera integration, along with all the other powerful goodness of the Tegra 4.
NVIDIA announced that it would be acquiring Icera in May 2011, but we’ve had to wait all this time until a fully integrated modem found its way into the Tegra family, and we’re not really complaining. We’re just glad it’s here.
You might know the Tegra 4i as “Project Grey”, awesomely named after our favorite telekinetic mutant, Jean Grey. (More on her later) The Tegra 4i rocks a whopping 2.3GHz quad-core CPU with the 5th battery saving core we’ve come to expect since the Tegra 3.
Here’s a taste of some of the Tegra 4i’s features:
- 60 custom NVIDIA GPU cores
- Quad-core CPU based on ARM’s newest and most efficient core— the R4 Cortex-A9 CPU— plus a fifth battery saver core
- A version of the NVIDIA i500 LTE modem optimized for integration
- Unique Chimera Computational Photography Architecture like Tegra 4
You’ll also get the expected features that come with the Tegra 4, like always-on HDR and more, but the real kicker here is the fully Icera modem integration that makes the Tegra 4i smaller than even the recently announced Qualcomm Snapdragon 800.
If you’re an X-Men fan, you know that Jean Grey had a dark side, and became the Phoenix, right? Well, NVIDIA is cleverly using that to its advantages and announcing the “Phoenix” reference smartphone design today as well. The design reference will help manufacturers build smartphones using the Tegra 4i faster, so the devices can make it into consumers’ faster.
While the average consumer might not be terribly excited that the Tegra 4 now officially has an integrated modem, but we’re pretty pumped that Qualcomm now isn’t the only kid on the block that will be offering the all in one solution now. Hm.. Phoenix vs. Snapdragon. Sounds like a good fight if you ask us!
