25 May 2012

Lenzfire

Lenzfire

NVIDIA is Working on $199 Quad Core Tablet – Kai

Posted: 24 May 2012 06:11 AM PDT

Nvidia and AMD are the two biggest graphic card manufacturers in the computer industry. AMD recently announced that it is much concentrated on mobile platforms, so we can expect AMD’s solutions on smartphone platforms soon. But NVIDIA has already entered into the manufacturing of smartphone processors such as Tegra 2, Tegra 3 etc,.

Tegra 2 was the processor in some smartphones released last year such as Samsung Galaxy R. It’s an 1GHz dual core processor, which is capable of playing 720p videos (videos with resolution 1280 x 720 pixels, also called HD videos).

Whereas Tegra 3 is the processor, which has 4 main cores and 1 auxiliary core. But generally it’s been called as Quad core processor. Tegra 3 is capable of playing 1080p videos (videos with resolution 1920 x 1080 pixels, also called Full HD videos). Recently released HTC One X smartphone and ASUS Transformer Prime tablets are powered by Tegra 3 processor. But both these devices are priced around Rs. 35,000 (900$).

Me370T

At CES ( International Consumer Electronic Show 2012 – Major technology related trade show, held each January at Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States ) Nvidia and ASUS (one of the largest computer motherboard manufacturers in the world) teamed up and showed a tablet powered by Tegra 3. They named it as ME370T, and said that the tablet would be priced around $ 250 (Rs. 12,500). But that tablet hasn’t been available in market and also there is no further news about it till date.

Tegra 3 based Kai platform, Tablet for 199 $

But then, at Nvidia company’s investor’s annual meeting, held last week, Rob Csongor (Vice President, Investor Relations at Nvidia) revealed and explained about Nvidia’s new idea, Kai. Kai isn’t just a processor like Tegra 3, it’s like a reference design of the entire platform, powered by Tegra 3 for tablets. These tablets will be powered by the most popular and latest Android 4.0 operating system (OS). The main jaw dropping thing here is that, the tablet designed as per Kai reference design will be priced at just 199 $ (10,000). If, what he said becomes true, then Kai will be first Quad core powered tablet available at this price point.

Rob Csongor’s words as such he said…

Our strategy on Android is simply to enable quad-core tablets running Android Ice Cream Sandwich to be developed and brought out to market at the $199 price point, and the way we do that is a platform we’ve developed called Kai. So this uses a lot of the secret sauce that’s inside Tegra 3 to allow you to develop a tablet at a much lower cost, by using a lot of innovation that we’ve developed to reduce the power that’s used by the display and use lower cost components within the tablet.

What I’m not certain is, whether Nvidia will release the Kai platform as a tablet by itself under the brand name ‘Nvidia’, or it will join hands with some tablet manufacturers like ASUS and implement its Kai platform in their tablets.
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