Las Vegas, NV – The Nvidia Tegra 4 was recently announced at CES 2013 and Nvidia is already declaring the Tegra 4 to be the world’s fastest mobile processor. Previously called Project Wayne, the Nvidia Tegra 4 is a System On A Chip (SoC) design that combines both the CPU (Central Processing Unit) and the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). As previously reported by The Inquisitr , the Tegra 4 will first be seen in Nvidia’s new portable gaming console called Project Shield.
As an example, if you own a Google Nexus 7 you are using a Tegra 3. Apple chose PowerVR for its iPad lineup. The Tegra 4 might be slightly more popular with cell phone carriers because the Tegra 4 includes Nvidia’s i500, a software modem based on Nvidia’s acquisition of Icera, which can be reprogrammed to support new network standards. It supports category 3 (100Mbps) LTE but will later be software patched to Category 4 (150Mbps). This means that smartphone and tablet manufacturers can get their products to market more quickly, since the 4G modem is built-in instead of being separate.
The Tegra 4 now packs 72 Nvidia GeForce GPU cores, which translates into six times the GPU power of Tegra 3. According to PC World , this extra graphics processing power should result in smoother, more realistic gaming, higher-resolution displays, and higher-resolution video playback. While even large tablets are unlikely to go beyond 1080p resolution , this means that devices using the Tegra 4 will be able to output via HDMI to 4K Ultra HD televisions that are also being announced at this year’s CES.
According to Anandtech , details on the Tegra 4 are still sparse since NVIDIA has not announced the individual SKUs, but we do know that the top-end configuration contains 5 ARM A15 CPU cores in a 4+1 configuration similar to Tegra 3. The four primary CPU cores are full speed while the fifth companion core is intended for lower power states and it performs background tasks in order to save on battery life. As a comparison, Samsung’s Exynos 5, found in the Google Nexus 10 tablet, is also based on ARM’s Cortex-A15, but that’s only a dual-core processor.
The GPU side is backed with a hereto unknown GPU architecture composed of 72 GPU cores. This is useful not just for gaming as Tegra 4 appeared to scream through loading 25 web pages, accomplishing the task in about half the time that it took the Nexus 10.
The Tegra 4 also greatly improves on battery performance since it consumes up to 45 percent less power than the Tegra 3. Whether the Tegra 4 is used in a smartphone, tablet, or the Nvidia Project Shield this should translate into extra hours of usage. Speaking of common usage, even the cameras will get an upgrade with Nvidia’s new computational photography engine. The engine is designed to allow for an array of high-dynamic range (HDR) capture possibilities for still photos, action shots with subject tracking, and video.
What do you think about the Nvidia Tegra 4?