Just in time for CES, electronics player NVIDIA has unveiled what it claims is the world’s fastest mobile processor – the Tegra 4 – a quad-core A15 chip with built-in 4G LTE capabilities.
NVIDIA said the new chip will enable faster smartphone performance, better battery life and lightning-fast web browsing. As well as better battery processing, the Tegra 4 also includes new camera capabilities through computational photography.
Tegra 4 consumes up to 45pc less power than its predecessor, Tegra 3, in common use cases. And it enables up to 14 hours of HD video playback on phones.
“Tegra 4 provides enormous processing power and efficiency to power smartphones and tablets, gaming devices, auto systems and PCs,” said Phil Carmack, senior vice-president of the Tegra business at NVIDIA.
“Its new capabilities, particularly in the area of computational photography, will help improve a whole range of existing products and lead to the creation of exciting new ones,” Carmack said.
Tegra 4 capabilities
Previously codenamed ‘Wayne’, Tegra 4 features 72 custom NVIDIA GeForce GPU cores – or six times the GPU horsepower of Tegra 3 – which deliver more realistic gaming experiences and higher-resolution displays.
It includes the first quad-core application of ARM’s most advanced CPU core, the Cortex-A15, which delivers 2.6x faster web browsing and breakthrough performance for apps.
Tegra 4 also enables worldwide 4G LTE voice and data support through an optional chipset, the fifth-generation NVIDIA Icera i500 processor. More efficient and 40pc the size of conventional modems, i500 delivers four times the processing capability of its predecessor, NVIDIA said.
Smartphones image via Shutterstock
