NVIDIA Shares Updates on Tegra and GeForce at Computex 2012

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.

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.

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”.

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.

Of GeForce GTX 680M and Ultrabooks

Besides Tegra, NVIDIA also gave us some updates on their GeForce graphics cards. The company is understandably very happy with their new GeForce GTX 600 series. We’ve reviewed the GeForce GTX 690, GTX 680 and GTX 670 earlier, so be sure to check them out. Based around Kepler, the new cards have been so popular that NVIDIA said that it has problems meeting demand - that's not a bad problem to have if you ask us.

Building on the momentum of the earlier released Kepler cards, NVIDIA has also just announced the GeForce GTX 680M. The important facts and figures of the GeForce GTX 680M are as follows:

• Based on Kepler (not a rebadged Fermi)
• 1344 CUDA cores
• 720MHz core clock speed
• 3600MHz DDR memory clock speed
• 4GB GDDR5
• 256-bit memory bus
• No GPU Boost, that’s exclusive to desktop SKUs

The chip will debut on Alienware’s M17x and M18x notebooks along with MSI’s GT70 and Clevo’s P150EM.

Next, NVIDIA also revealed that the latest generation of Ivy Bridge-powered Ultrabooks will begin supporting NVIDIA GPUs. Although this is not entirely new - the Acer TimelineU M3 had a GeForce 640M - it is good to see notebook makers adopting discrete GPUs on their Ultrabooks because it gives them so much more performance, especially where gaming is concerned. It also suggests that AMD's Trinity APUs featured in more price-competitive notebooks are actually of considerable threat that Intel's Ultrabooks require NVIDIA's assistance despite Intel's all new HD Graphics 4000 integrated GPU in their Ivy Bridge CPUs.

Here’s some upcoming Ultrabooks that will have NVIDIA GPUs in them:

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