Yesterday in Seattle at the HTC Frequencies conference, Nvidia’s Mike Rayfield introduced an updated roadmap for the company’s budding SoC business, and there is good news.
The Tegra 3 will be updated to something dubbed Tegra 3+, though it won’t be called that in the final release, which will finally marry LTE and an upgraded Nvidia hardware design. Though he wouldn’t give any indication as to how much of an upgrade the chip would be, we can assume it will be based on the existing quad-core Cortex-A9 reference design with a few tweaks. Perhaps it will move from a 40nm to a 32nm build process, or migrate to the more desirable Cortex-A15 design.
But he also reiterated that LTE connectivity is coming to existing Tegra 3 and the new Tegra 3+ chips by Q3 of this year. His reasoning for the delay was quite candid: Qualcomm, the major manufacturer for LTE-capable basebands, doesn’t seem to want to work with Nvidia, as the two companies compete on a number of levels in the component business. With Nvidia’s consolidation of Icera, and it’s move towards a vertically-integrated manufacturing scheme, it seems they they are poised to integrate their own LTE solution by Fall of this year, which would mean an industry less reliant on a single company for their high-speed baseband components.
After Tegra 3+, Nvidia is set to release its Tegra 4 chipset, codenamed “Wayne,” alongside its unified SoC, “Grey,” in early 2013.
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