This week the folks at ASUS have had a bit of a leak in their pipes with both product images and details surrounding their next Android tablet, the ASUS MeMO Pad 10. This machine (product number ME301T) works with a 10.1-inch IPS LCD display with 1280 x 800 pixel resolution and a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor under the hood. Oddly enough, inside this machine you’ll find just 1GB of ram, and that display resolution is less than what we’ve seen on devices like the Transformer Infinity from last year – could this be a budget-minded machine?
What we’re seeing here is an extension of NVIDIA’s plan to push down-clocked versions of their processors to machines that are then priced so low that the competition cannot possibly compete. And it’s not the first time this has happened. We saw this strategy working in the Google Nexus 7 tablet also manufactured by ASUS, and that tablet has been selling like hotcakes since birth.
This ASUS MeMO Pad 10 will be busting out with 16GB of internal storage, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean right out of the box, and both front and back-facing cameras. The front facing camera will be 1.2 megapixels while the back will be 5 megapixels strong, and you’ll have a microSD card to store all the media you collect – at the moment we’re not sure what the max card size is that you’ll be able to plug in there, but we’re expecting 32GB.
BONUS: This tablet has been tipped more than once before with basically the same specifications – looks to be a lock!
This tablet will be working with a microUSB port instead of the larger port used on previous ASUS tablets and will have a microHDMI port as well for working with your HDTV. This tablet has been tipped to be appearing for between 329 to 389 Euro, this meaning a direct conversion to USD would still be above $500 – not exactly wallet friendly. We must expect that this price will be modified for the US market or that the device wont be appearing inside our borders – we shall see!
Also of interest is the fact that this machine has appeared in press photos in blue and white while the listings found thus far have also shown red and pink casings available at launch – wild stuff! Expect this tablet to appear at Mobile World Congress 2013 more than likely!
NVIDIA has already announced the Tegra 4 earlier this month, and Vizio is the first, in our opinion, to showcase an actual product running Tegra 4. We’re talking about Vizio’s 10.1-inch Tegra 4 tablet that was demoed to us at CES 2013. Now, DigiTimes is reporting that Toshiba, too, is planning to launch its own Tegra 4-powered tablet in June this year. Citing from Taiwanese supply chain makers, the publication says that Asus and Acer are still undecided about using Tegra 4. Sources told DigiTimes that Tegra 4 is merely a backup solution for now, since Asus has a close partnership with Qualcomm. (more…)
NVIDIA is hoping to win back mobile processor marketshare with a plan that involves building its own smartphone and tablet hardware designs and offering them white label to OEMs in Russia and China, according to a new report from Unwired View. The idea is that by doing that, NVIDIA gets complete control over hardware performance, while also undercutting the competition on price and hopefully flooding the market with devices based on its platform.
That’s not a new strategy for NVIDIA, which has done essentially the same thing in the graphics card market, Unwired View points out. NVIDIA has some traction in smartphone and tablet processors with its existing Tegra 3 platform, and it announced the Tegra 4 was just announced at CES, with some predicting that it will be a big winner in the mobile market. But Qualcomm is the definite elephant in the room, and its new Snapdragon processors unveiled at CES look to push the envelope and help it maintain its lead among OEM adoption.
Building their own white label designs with producers aiming at the bottom end of the market has a couple of advantages for NVIDIA. First, it gives them an opportunity to control the entire soup-to-nuts product design, meaning they can build hardware that will maximize the performance of the Tegra processor. Second, they can start building their own components at a much higher scale, as their low-cost partners ship more and more cheap, but fairly high-quality units in developing markets. That will help with economies of scale, making it easier to produce chips cheaply and in large batches for other hardware producers.
Devices resulting from this plan will begin to come to market in the May to June timeframe, if the report’s source is correct. Some of these will carry the NVIDIA branding, Unwired View says, and some will not, but all should be relatively high-quality devices at the price points offered. This is still a rumor at this stage, but an intriguing one that if true, could help NVIDIA gain even more ground as a mobile processing powerhouse on the international stage.
This week it’s been made clear – or perhaps just clearer than ever before – that a company able to manufacture its own device components is a company that will thrive. According to the readouts from Gartner showing 2012′s top consumers in the semiconductor universe specifically, Samsung and Apple are out in front of the pack – by a significant margin. Semiconductors, mobile processors, and hardware from displays to memory cards are all a part of this puzzle, and as the two next entries on that list show with double-digit percentage drops show, it’s not just Apple and Samsung that are floating upward here coming into 2013, it’s mobile smart devices as a whole (and all their little bits and pieces).
Samsung is a company that has the ability to create each of the most vital bits, (like their Exynos processor for mobile devices), for each smartphone and tablet it puts on the market. They are the company that went through the most semiconductors in the market in the world in 2012, and they’re making these components themselves. While companies like LG and Lenovo create devices and need billions of dollars worth of semiconductors too, they need groups like Qualcomm and NVIDIA to manufacture those pieces of hardware for them.
So while Samsung is indeed made up of several different businesses, one that makes displays, another that makes processors, another that designs smartphones, it’s still the brand Samsung that profits from one part consuming products from another. So when you see Samsung at the top of the global semiconductor customers list in 2012, a big chunk of that change is being kept in the family. Meanwhile even the third place company HP must rely on groups like Intel in a large way for the architecture in their machines.
Groups like Qualcomm and NVIDIA rely on the companies that do not manufacture their own device innards, on the other hand, so it’s not as if there’s only one perfect model here created by these top companies with their own supplies. Qualcomm creates mobile modems that sit in a large cross-section of the smartphones you see on the market today, while NVIDIA’s Tegra line of processors all but dominated the first wave of Android tablets and Super Phones that came out across 2011.
You’ll find the Qualcomm Snapdragon line of processors coming out in some of the most popular smartphones over the past year, too, including none other than Samsung’s Galaxy S III. What we’re going to be seeing here through 2013 – and what we’ve begun to see already – is Samsung sticking with their own Exynos processor lineup as much as they can muster. Meanwhile groups like ViewSonic, Toshiba, and ASUS will continue to work with NVIDIA and HTC, LG, and Nokia will opt for Qualcomm. Of course those partnerships aren’t definitive by any means, and several of the companies have gone between Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments (now out of the mobile processor business), and others in the past.
There’s also a cross-over happening on the part of NVIDIA with their first production device by the name of Project SHIELD. This is a mobile gaming handheld that’s branded by NVIDIA and includes both the Tegra 4 processor and their own Icera modem. we’ll just have to wait and see who they worked with to create the rest of the components in the final build, but for now, the point is clear: it seems clear that creating your own device, top to bottom, is becoming more and more preferable by companies with the ability to work with such a process.
At yesterday’s investor meeting in Taipei, TSMC’s chairman and CEO Morris Chang shared the good news that his company’s 28nm chip shipment this year will triple that of last year, which should boost its annual increase in revenue to above the industry’s average rate of seven percent. China Times reports that orders for TSMC’s 28nm silicon are lined up to as far out as late Q3, courtesy of demand for ARM processors, baseband chips, graphics processors and x86 processors. This is no surprise considering the likes of Qualcomm (Snapdragon 600 and 800), Huawei (HiSilicon K3V2 Pro and K3V3), NVIDIA (Tegra 4), AMD (Temash and Kabini) and possibly Apple will be ordering more 28nm-based chipsets from the foundry throughout the year. TSMC did struggle with its 28nm supply for Qualcomm early last year, but it eventually caught up later on, and Chang stated that TSMC now owns nearly 100 percent of the 28nm process market.
Looking further ahead, Chang said his company’s already seen enough clients and demand for the upcoming 20nm manufacturing process, which should have a more significant financial contribution in 2014. The exec also predicted that at TSMC, its 20nm production will see a bigger growth rate between 2014 and 2015 than its 28nm counterpart did between 2012 and 2013 — the former should eventually nab close to 90 percent of the market, said Chang.
While we got to see plenty of notebooks and all-in-ones from Vizio during CES 2013, we also got the chance to check out a 7-inch and 10-inch tablet from the company that don’t seem to be as far along in the development process as the other products. Nevertheless, they certainly were cool, sporting technical specifications that can take on the larger tablet manufacturers out there. Sadly, we don’t have release dates for either of these two tablets, but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about them in the meantime!
We’ll start right off with Vizio‘s 7-inch tablet, which is obviously the company’s answer to the wildly popular Nexus 7. Its specs aren’t all that different from those of the Nexus 7 either, sporting 1200 x 800 resolution, 16GB of internal memory, and a NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor. Users will also have WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity at their disposal, and for a 7-inch tablet, this one looks pretty good. The tablet itself looks sleek and the visuals are sharp thanks to the 1200×800 resolution. It also feels pretty good in the hand, as most 7-inch tablets seem to.
Moving right along to the 10-inch tablet, we’ll have 2560 x 1600 resolution, so starting right off, we can already see similarities between it and Samsung’s Nexus 10. With that kind of resolution, I’d typically be worried that the processor would struggle a bit, but this tablet is running a brand new Tegra 4 under the hood. Add to that 32GB of internal storage with the option to expand thanks to the microSD slot, Bluetooth 4.0 functionality, and a microHDMI port, and you’ve got a tablet worth getting excited about.
The screen on the 10-inch tablet looks absolutely great, and if you’ve seen the display on the Nexus 10 in person, then you should have a relatively good idea of what to expect. The only downside is that 7-inch tablets seem to have spoiled me and 10-inch tablets now feel weird to hold. That’s more likely a personal hang up than a negative mark against Vizio, but in any case, this tablet certainly isn’t without heft. What’s more, swiping through screens on the tablet seemed very smooth, and there were only a few dropped frames that I noticed during HD video playback. There’s no word on when this bad boy will launch, but expect to be waiting awhile considering that Vizio wants to put a Tegra 4 in it.
All in all, I was pretty impressed by what I saw from Vizio. These tablets may not being anything incredibly new, but they’re still both solid pieces of equipment. Now we wait for release dates to be announced, which could be some time away in the case of the 10-inch tablet. Vizio’s 7-incher is scheduled for launch sometime in the first half of 2013, so we’ll have to see if Vizio can stick with that launch window. Be sure to check out our CES hub for all you need to know from the show!
Both Windows 8 and the tablet-based iteration of the OS Windows RT are now able to access the brand new system known as Microsoft PLAY, full of Xbox games for the masses. This system is part of PlayXBLA, aka Xbox Live Arcade, Microsoft’s initiative dedicated to bringing games developed in part (or in whole) by Microsoft itself, often collaborating with independent development studios to bring optimized games to Xbox 360, Windows Phone, and Windows 8/RT. Interestingly enough, you’ll find that this particular project is done in collaboration also with NVIDIA and their Windows 8/RT on Tegra program, too.
This system is similar, though not the same, as the NVIDIA TegraZone for Windows RT. One of the big differences here is that the TegraZone works with games that have been optimized for the Tegra 3 (and Tegra 4) processor, the Microsoft PLAY environment is specified for Windows 8 and Windows RT. So crossover games are possible, but we’re talking about different things entirely as far as how the games are being marketed.
The games you’re going to be able to access today in the Microsoft PLAY environment number to 15, this providing a modest offering for the initial launch, including titles that’ll keep your eyes peeled for more in the future. These titles are all being tagged with Microsoft Studios in this case, this meaning they’re good enough for that seal of approval, likely to be appearing in stores as the demonstration-level quality they want all Windows 8 and Windows RT machines to be up at in the wild.
• Skulls of the Shogun • Gunstringer: Dead Man Running • ilomilo+ • Wordament • Toy Soldiers – Cold War: Touch Edition • Taptiles • Rocket Riot 3D • Reckless Racing • Pinball FX • Microsoft Minesweeper • Microsoft Solitaire Collection • Microsoft Mahjong • Hydro Thunder : Hurricane • Adera • 4 Elements II
You’ll be able to find these games on the Windows Store right this minute, and many more games are on the way. What we’re hoping for in the future is more than these arcade-style games – full-fledged Xbox 360 (or 720 by the time we see them) games ported over or made optimized at the moment they’re ready for the gaming console, available everywhere. Of course that might not be Microsoft’s game, but NVIDIA’s. We shall see!
At CES 2013 we saw the unveiling of the NVIDIA Tegra 4, a mobile processor the company suggested was the World’s Fastest, it containing 72 GPU cores, five CPU cores (one of them an A15 “companion”), and the ability to work with 4G LTE. The Tegra 4 will be working with the NVIDIA Icera i500, that being a 28nm HP, Category 3 LTE (4 in the pipeline) Soft Modem. These two pieces of architecture together will be NVIDIA’s hero technology for mobile devices throughout 2013.
NVIDIA Tegra 4
The NVIDIA Tegra 4 System-on-Chip with five ARM Cortex A15 cores – four of them with 1.9GHz max clock speed, a fifth synthesized to work at lower power. The technology working around this fifth Companion core is similar to the Tegra 3, and for the lay person, it may as well be presented as the same due to how similar it really is. The fifth core is not visible to the operating system you’re using (be it Android, Windows, or something else), acting as more of a “Shadow Core” or a “Ninja” as we’ve been apt to call it, just as it was with Tegra 3.
Above you’re going to see a rundown of what Tegra 4 is, how it compares to Tegra 3, and what the future holds for mobile processing. The talk you’re seeing above is with NVIDIA Technical Marketing Director Nick Stam who presented us more of a detailed look at the Tegra 4 and what it means for mobile devices in 2013 (and beyond.)
For those of you that want to get rather technical with it all, you’ll be interested in knowing that the die size here in this new model is 80mm^2, ever so slightly larger than Tegra 3, but a whole lot denser as well. The cores you’re seeing here work on 28nm HPL, that being 28nm low power with high-k plus metal gates. What that basically means here is that you’re going to get one extremely optimized experience, made for high performance and low power consumption – as every great processor should.
The Tegra 4 processor will be working with “Always-On” HDR camera technology as well. You’ll find a rather interesting set of details in our initial reveal post, and we’ll be seeing this technology in-person sooner than later. It’s then that we’ll be seeing what it really means to be able to instantly take a shot with multiple exposures at once!
NVIDIA Icera i500 Soft Modem with 4G LTE
The NVIDIA Icera i500 Soft Modem is what the company describes as 40% smaller than a conventional die – this referring to other modems they’ve worked with from companies other than themselves, of course. The Icera i500 will work with Soft Modem technology, starting with UE Category 3 LTE (100 Mbps downlink on 20 MHz FDD-LTE) and moving forward to UE Category 4 LTE in the very near future. VoLTE is supported with other voice mode technologies, and the modem will be paired with a new never before seen transceiver built on 65nm LP CMOS.
The NVIDIA Icera i500 Soft Modem is built on TSMC’s 28nm high performance High-K Metal Gate process, and the company is able to power gate each of its cores individually. Depending on the needs of each device’s software package, each of the NVIDIA Icera i500′s 8 cores can be used or not used, gating based on changing load conditions.
Following Tegra 4
Those of you getting pumped up about Tegra 4 and NVIDIA’s full 2013 experience, you’ll have a fabulous time hitting up our massive Tegra Hub. There you’ll find not just your everyday NVIDIA Tegra mobile processor news, but featured hands-on articles, must-read up-to-the-minute updates, and reviews of Tegra-toting devices of all kinds.
Right this minute you’ll find several stories on the first device to have been revealed working with the Tegra 4 processor: NIVIDA’s own Project SHIELD. You’ll find plenty of awesome Project SHIELD action in the immediate future and up with its final name some time in Q2 of this year. Also have a peek in the timeline below to see the first important detail articles to have come down the line here in the first week since Tegra 4 was first revealed – Project SHIELD included!
This past week at CES 2013, the SlashGear team was privy to a handful of fantastic or otherwise generally interesting next-generation technology, but for yours truly, there was nothing as significant for its designer as NVIDIA’s Project SHIELD. I want to be clear in saying that there may have been more market-ready, real-world devices and services presented to us that have hard release dates and/or real track records for success in earlier models, but when you take Project SHIELD and speak about how important even just the idea is for the NVIDIA brand and ecosystem, nothing else had as important a set of implications.
When we were introduced to Project SHIELD at NVIDIA’s press conference during CES, the company’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang prefaced the situation with assurances on the future: “Next-generation gamers play literally on whatever they can, whenever they can. Just like we enjoy movies on multiple screens, just like we listen to music on multiple devices.” Though the delivery couldn’t have been as powerful as the initial reveal of the iPod, a revolutionary device for the music industry (referenced in the conference earlier as such), NVIDIA intended and intends to push Project SHIELD as a revolutionary device for the gaming industry.
We had a chat with Nick Stam, Technical Marketing Director for NVIDIA (as you’ll see above), in which we were told that not only is Project SHIELD a real project, but it’ll be coming to the market in the second quarter of 2013 as an NVIDIA-branded piece of equipment. Though the idea of creating a bridge between large hardware (PC and console) and small hardware (mobile) gaming may be more significant than the actual SHIELD device, the device is being prepared for a real release.
“What you’re seeing here is a Beta version that we’re showing at CES – and there may be some modifications to the physical design elements, some of the software elements, but our plan is to ship this Project SHIELD under an official marketing name in Q2. That’s our plan: in Q2 2013 in retail. So in retail and e-tail, with an NVIDIA name.” – Stam
NVIDIA has appeared in the news essentially the same amount of times for its mobile processor business as it has for its high-powered computing components over the past year. As we see them tie the two together with SHIELD as well as NVIDIA GRID for cloud-based gaming companies and NVIDIA GeForce Experience for high-powered gaming optimization, the circle can be made complete. With the continuation of NVIDIA’s rather successful GeForce GPU lineup and the new Tegra 4 mobile processor (also just revealed this past week) as well, NVIDIA has created a new ecosystem for themselves.
You’ll need GeForce GPU power to stream games from your PC to your Project SHIELD device, and though any number of games will work on the device from the Google Play market for Android, NVIDIA’s Tegra Zone will surely be the place where you’ll find the best of the best, optimized for the Tegra 4 processor you’ve got under the hood, made perfect for the physical controls you’ve got in front of you.
It’s difficult to say how much of an impact this device will have in and of itself as far as sales go – certainly not until we see the price, at least. The confidence with which NVIDIA presents this device as a knot that ties together its two major product lines – PC and mobile – that’s what will have the biggest effect on their future. No other company made such a unique product ecosystem presentation at CES 2013.
We’re used to CES being all about gadgets and technology in general, but this year, there were actually a surprising number of major gaming announcements. NVIDIA positioned itself front and center, leading the charge and talking about a number of new products and services that are bound to get any gamer bouncing up and down with glee. Perhaps the biggest reveal NVIDIA’s press conference held was the reveal of Project SHIELD, a new Android-based games console that’s packing the company’s latest mobile processor, the Tegra 4.
While that’s impressive enough, it gets even better: Project SHIELD won’t just play Android games, but is also capable of streaming games over Wi-Fi from a computer outfitted with a GeForce GPU. During our hands-on time with the device, we got to see it streaming Black Ops II to its 5-inch 720p screen, so there’s certainly plenty to look forward to with this new device. The streaming functionality makes a good segway to another major announcement from the company – NVIDIA GRID.
With NVIDIA GRID, we’re seeing NVIDIA enter the cloud gaming space, outfitting its server racks with enough GeForce GPUs to supposedly match the power of 700 Xbox 360s. A number of key players have failed or otherwise stalled out in the cloud gaming space, so it’ll be interesting to see if NVIDIA can excel. The company also gave us more details about GeForce Experience, which will do its best to optimize your graphics settings so that games run as good as they can on your rig.
Of course, the show wasn’t only about NVIDIA. The company made a lot of major gaming announcements – that much is true – but it had quite a bit of competition for gamers’ attention. Razer had its Project Fiona tablet on hand at the show, only now it’s been renamed the Razer Edge. Making use of Intel’s third-gen Core line of processors (with one configuration even sporting a Core i7) and an NVIDIA GT640M LE GPU, this tablet definitely has some stellar hardware. It will also have a number of accessories available separately, including a detachable controller dock, keyboard dock, 360-esque gamepad, and docking station that has all the ports you need to turn your Edge into a mini gaming desktop.
As you might imagine, we found during our hands-on time that playing games on the Razer Edge is a blast, and seeing triple-A retail titles like Dishonored running on it at excellent frame rates certainly was exciting. It seems safe to say that if the Edge catches on with gamers, then we can look forward to a whole new era in mobile gaming.
Archos was at the show, and though it had a number of different devices on display, one of the more intriguing products was its GamePad. The Archos GamePad is another tablet made specifically for gamers, though it comes with a far less expensive price tag than the Razer Edge. As one of the only Android tablets to provide physical face buttons, this makes the tablet a prime choice for people who like enjoy games but hate touchscreen controls. In our hands-on, we said that though you’ll have to map the physical controls for a fair number of Android games, the process seems pretty easy, and should keep the downtime between downloading and gaming short.
Right before Pepcom kicked off, we heard that Xi3 and Valve would be showing off a new product. Xi3 was there in force at Pepcom, showing off its brand new 7 series modular computer, and while we made a few guesses at what Valve would be using it for, in the end it turned out that we were wrong. It would appear that Valve has invested heavily in Xi3′s modular computer to offer set-top “Steam boxes,” meant for gaming and streaming content, so we’ll be keeping and eye on that.
Switching gears completely to move from hardware to peripherals, there were two companies in particular that were showing off new gaming mice. One was Genius, which let us get a little hands-on time in with its relatively new Gila mouse. The Gila comes with a number of accessibility options, letting users program any of the twelve buttons and featuring highly adjustable dpi settings.
Mad Catz is not one to be outdone, however, giving us a look at its new R.A.T.M and M.O.U.S.9 mice. If you’re a serious PC gamer, these mice seem to be aimed directly at you. Both mice are quite similar, with the M.O.U.S.9 being just a bit bigger than its brother. Both have very unique designs as far as gaming mice go, with buttons everywhere on the pair. They each can supposedly boast one year of battery life as well, so that’s something to get stoked about if you’re always on your gaming PC.
In the end, this was actually a pretty big year for gaming at CES. All of the stuff we saw during the show will of course being popping up more and more as the year goes on, and we’re hoping that we’ll get the chance to spend much more time with Project SHIELD, the Razer Edge, and the Archos GamePad soon. Keep it here to SlashGear for more information on all of these cool devices, and in the meantime, be sure to check out our CES portal for our full show coverage.
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NVIDIA has already announced the Tegra 4
