Event Coverage

NVIDIA Shares Updates on Tegra and GeForce at Computex 2012

By Kenny Yeo - 7 Jun 2012

Tegra, LTE Certification & the "Kai" Tablet

Of Tegra 3, LTE Certification & Kai...

At Computex 2012, NVIDIA has provided with some updates with regards to Tegra and GeForce. Let’s begin with Tegra.

Ujesh Desai, NVIDIA's VP of Product Marketing, headed the session.

First of all, NVIDIA wanted to share that Tegra 3 is now being used over 30 phone design, up from just 15 in 2011, showing just how popular Tegra 3 is becoming with phone makers. Furthermore, Tegra 3 phones are also becoming more affordable and more accessible. Out of the 15 Tegra 3 phone designs in 2011, none of them cost below US$300. In 2012, however, out of the 30, 13 were below US$300. Digging deeper into those figures, another trend is that China is now Tegra 3’s biggest market. In 2011, 5 of the 15 phone designs were from China; in 2012, it is now 18 out of 30.

The number of phones with Tegra 3 has increased significantly. Also, China is now NVIDIA's biggest market for Tegra phones, accounting for more than half of all phone designs. And with LTE certification, we can look forward to more Tegra-powered smartphones moving forward.

To add, Tegra 3 is now also LTE certified with AT&T. This is achieved thanks to the NVIDIA i410 modem module, which was developed with help of Icera, a network company which NVIDIA acquired only a year ago. This is an important development since competing SoCs such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 has both 3G and 4G radios integrated within the chip itself.

Moving on, NVIDIA also discussed its tablet strategy. Taking a page out of the Kindle Fire, which is selling like hotcakes. NVIDIA believes that US$199 is the sweet spot for tablets and have set about developing one called “Kai”.

Not much is known about Kai at this point except that it'll come in at around US$199 and can run both Android and Windows RT.

We don’t have much detail on Kai yet, but it is NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 reference design tablet. Kai could conceivably run either Android or Windows RT, and that it is designed to have excellent battery life and to provide a great touch experience. It will also offer full Microsoft Office support which means users can run Excel, Word and Powerpoint on it without any problems. And it will also be enterprise ready.

There's no concrete word if Kai would actually be the final product, but NVIDIA has said that it is already being used as a platform for other makers and we should be able to see products based on Kai very soon.

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