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Nvidia Tegra 4 chip leak whets appetite for non-iOS tablets

As soon as Q1 2013, Nvidia's Tegra 4 chip aims to make quad-core tablets even faster, according to data leaked by a Chinese Web site.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Brooke Crothers
Asus Transformer Prime uses an Nvidia quad-core Tegra 3. A faster quad-core Tegra 4 is coming.
Asus Transformer Prime uses an Nvidia quad-core Tegra 3. A faster quad-core Tegra 4 is coming. Asus

A roadmap of Nvidia's next chip, the Tegra 4, could also be a blueprint for the internals of future Android and Windows tablets.

If VR-ZONE's (in this case, VR-ZONE's Chinese-language site) sources speak the truth, then we've got plenty of tablets packing quad-core A15 chips to look forward to.

What's an A15 you ask? That's the next chip design -- officially the Cortex A15 -- from tablet and smartphone chip design powerhouse ARM.

Think of it this way: Four A15s are faster than the four Nvidia Tegra 3 Cortex-A9s now found in the Asus Transformer Prime. And the Transformer Prime is already pretty fast for a tablet. (Technically, Nvidia calls its quad-core Tegra 4-Plus-1 because there's a fifth battery-life-friendly core for less-demanding tasks.)

But getting back to tablets. Since Nvidia is aiming at both Android and Windows 8, that means we can expect tablets and/or hybrids in both camps with this silicon.

Starting in the first quarter of 2013, the 1.8GHz Tegra 4 should make an appearance in a "10-inch" device (read: tablet), according to VR-ZONE. Other Tegra 4 versions will appear in the third quarter of 2013.

It gets more curious for the future SP3X chip. That's listed as LTE (4G) capable. It's also spec'd as a chip with an older ARM A9 design. We'll have to wait for more deets from Nvidia before we can even begin to speculate about this one.

(Via Engadget)