NVidia at the pre-opening event at CES 2013 has officially revealed Tegra 4, though there weren’t too many surprises in the company’s latest SoC (system-on-chip) announcement.
Details regarding Tegra 4 leaked via China a few weeks ago and NVidia’s reveal doesn’t add much new to what is already known. The Tegra 4 SoC will feature four Cortex A-15 CPU cores, along with a low-power core that Tegra 4-powered devices will switch to when there is no heavy lifting to be done. The rumoured 72 GPU cores are all present and accounted for as well.
NVidia made a bigger splash with the announcement of a handheld gaming console, called ‘Project Shield’, which is powered by the Tegra 4 SoC. Project Shield is a console/display/controller unit able to output to 4K and NVidia said that it will feature a 10 hour battery life. The display is a 5″ 720p affair and the whole unit looks very compact, featuring ports for HDMI, microSD, Micro-USB and audio outputs.
Project Shield, which runs on the Android platform, can stream some Steam games, plays Android titles and outputs 4K video to a compatible TV and it can also browse the web. Just where it fits in to the world of tablets, phones and gaming devices remains to be seen. There are no details on availability just yet.
Source: Ars Technica and Gizmodo