Nvidia is apparently having a pretty busy day with the announcement of its newest Geforce GTX Titan GPU but that did not stop them from officially annoucing the Tegra 4i. Previously known as the Project Grey, the Tegra 4i combines a Cortex-A9 CPU with an i500 LTE modem.
Although it shares the similar name with the quad-core Tegra 4 chip it is nowhere near since the Tegra 4 is based on Cortex-A15 architecture. Of course, Tegra 4i does bring some improvements as we are still looking at 4-plus-1 design based on ARM's latest R4 Cortex-A9 CPU paired up with a fifth battery saver core. The CPU part is clocked at 2.3GHz and it also bring a improved GPU part with a total of 60 GPU cores, five times the number of GPU cores in Tegra 3.
The i500 LTE modem is integrated directly in the chip and, according to Nvidia, features networking upgradability and scalability as it can be programmed over-the-air to support new frequencies and air interfaces, something that other modem vendors apparently do not have.
Nvidia demonstrated the new Tegra 4i in its Phoenix smartphone reference design that we wrote about here and aims Tegra 4i at smartphones while Tegra 4 will mostly be for tablets, at least if you ask Nvidia.
Unfortunately, Nvidia did not shed any light on Tegra 4i design wins.