Nvidia’s new SHIELD Tablet filing is dated May 11th and describes an 8-inch tablet named P2290W. The FCC application itself is dated February 23, 2016 and confirms a 5100mAh lithium-ion battery (slightly lower than the current 5197mAh battery), Bluetooth 4.0 LE, as well as dual-band 802.11n/ac Wi-Fi just like the current models.

The tablet measures 4.8 inches wide, 8.6 inches tall and 0.3 inches thick (122 x 218 x 7.6mm), making it slightly shorter and 1.5mm thinner than the current Shield and Shield K1 models.

Nvidia Shield Tablet (July 2014) / Shield Tablet K1 (November 2015)

Nvidia released the original Shield Tablet in July 2014 and later decided to cut costs by re-releasing almost the exact same device in November 2015 under the name “Shield Tablet K1.” The second-generation model only dropped a few small features – no more DirectStylus 2 active pen, no microUSB power cable, and storage capacity was limited to just 16GB (the original offered 16GB Wi-Fi and 32GB LTE models).

Both devices use the Tegra K1 chipset, codenamed “Logan.” This is a 32-bit ARM-based chip built on a 28-nanometer process and features four 2.2GHz ARM Cortex A-15 cores (plus a third-gen “battery saver” core) and a 192-core Kepler-based GK20A GPU. The devices launched with an 8-inch 1920x1200 display (~283 ppi), 2GB of DDR3L memory, 16GB of storage, a 5-megapixel front camera with HDR, a 5-megapixel rear camera with HDR and autofocus, dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi with 2x2 MIMO, Bluetooth 4.0, a microSD card slot, a microUSB 2.0 port for data and charging, and a 5197 mAh (19.75Wh) lithium-ion battery.    

Almost identically, the Shield Tablet (July 2014) and Shield Tablet K1 (November 2015) both measure 5 inches wide, 8.8 inches tall and 0.36 inches thick (221 x 126 x 9.1mm). They also both weigh 390g. The Shield Tablet K1, however, uses rubberized speaker grills on the sides of the display, while the original uses solid plastic. The only other cosmetic difference is that Nvidia’s Shield logo was changed from gloss black to silver on the re-released model.

Tegra X1 tablet benchmarks originally appeared in November

Back in November, information appeared on GFXBench of a device labeled “NVIDIA SHIELD X1,” complete with the same basic specifications as the recent FCC listing – an 8-inch display, 1.9GHz Tegra X1 processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage and Android 6.0 Marshmallow. While it is likely that this new FCC filing could be the same device, there is also the possibility that it’s a completely different one.

Meanwhile, some AnTuTu benchmarks surfaced that same month showing the X1 device running at a score of 134,000. This is compared to 103,692 on Samsung's Exynos 8890 and 43,851 on the current quad-core Tegra K1 (Kepler).

Nvidia's Tegra X1, codenamed "Erista," is the same 64-bit ARM-based chip featured in the company’s first-generation Shield Android TV media console that launched in May 2015. It is built on a 20nm process and features eight 2GHz CPU cores – four ARM Cortex-A57 cores and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration – along with a 1GHz, 256-core Maxwell-based GM20B GPU and 3GB of RAM. The chip supports up to 4K (3840x2160p) video at 60fps (H.265, H.264, VP9), up to 1.3 gigapixels of camera throughput and Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression, along with DirectX 12 and OpenGL ES 3.1.

The new 8-inch, Tegra X1 Maxwell-based Shield tablet is expected to arrive sometime before the end of the year.