Known for its Tegra chip architecture, which has up-to-this-point been used in tablets and 'super phones', the Tegra 4i is a much smaller, cheaper option, which Nvidia claims offers the highest performance for its area.
Indeed, it says per square mm of silicon, Tegra 4i offers better performance that Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 and its own larger Tegra 4 brother.
Downsizing for growth
Nvidia says this new approach resulted from its acquisition of UK modem outfit Icera in 2011.
Its expertise has allowed Nvidia to squeeze some the performance of the Tegra 4 into a much smaller integrated chip.
"For the first time, we can address a mainstream smartphone market," said Nvidia's director of product market, Matt Wuebbling.
Tweaking the smarts
As for details of the Tegra 4i architecture, it's based on the fourth rev (aka R4) of ARM's Cortex A9 CPU and clocked at 2.3 GHz.
It's presented in Nvidia's 4+1 design, which combined a quad-core CPU with a power-saving single core for low level processing.
Wuebbling said Nvidia had also been heavily involved in optimising ARM's R3 design, providing a performance boost of 15-30 percent. The fact that Tegra 4i's CPU offers twice the performance of the A9 design used in the Tegra 3 is also due to the higher clockspeed.
The Tegra 4i uses the same GPU cores as the Tegra 4, although it has 60 cores rather than the 72 used in the Tegra 4. Other commonalities include Nvidia's Chimera architecture for HDR photos, the i500 software modem, and the same video engine and image signal processor.
In your hand
The result is a chip that Nvidia's already sampling and expects to be available in real phones before the end of 2013.
To help OEMs meet this schedule, it's come up with what it's calling its Phoenix reference platform.
It's a 8 mm thick Android device with a 5-inch/1080p touchscreen, which is designed to be a starting point for manufacturers to optimise around, although they could put it into production if they so desired.
