NVIDIA’s Tegra 4i Might Not be Out Yet, But it Just Became 50% Faster

Announced in February, NVIDIA’s Tegra 4i sets out to be the company’s ‘fast and frugal’ SoC offering. Compared to its bigger brother, Tegra 4, it lobs off 12 GPU cores to sit at 60, and adds in an integrated i500 LTE modem. Aside from these changes, both chips are essentially the same – we’d just naturally expect about a 20% performance improvement with the Tegra 4.

While neither Tegra 4 or 4i are available in products right now (SHIELD (4) looks to be the first, followed up by a ZTE superphone (4i) this summer), NVIDIA has posted on its blog that at CTIA in Las Vegas, it’s just demonstrated its chip churning through 150Mbit/s of LTE bandwidth – up from 100Mbit/s at the product’s unveiling in February. According to the company, no hardware changes have been made – this is purely software. This, according to the company, “showcases the adaptability and flexibility of NVIDIA’s software-defined radio technology.”

The demo was conducted using a tester equipped for LTE Cat 4 network transfer – necessary because Cat 4 networks don’t exist yet. So far, Tegra 4i is looking quite attractive, but the wait to see it hit some products is becoming a little painful.