Details on NVIDIA’s Next-Generation Tegra SoC Leak

Sam Reynolds — December 19th, 2012

Details on NVIDIA’s next-generation mobile chip have apparently leaked online via a Chinese hardware forum.

According to a slide posted on Chip Hell, NVIDIA’s next-generation Tegra mobile system-on-a-chip will be called ‘Wayne’ — in continuation of the Batman-themed naming scheme that had NVIDIA’s current Tegra chip named ‘Kal-El’ (Tegra 3) during development.

Leaked information says that this next-gen Tegra chip will feature NVIDIA’s 4-Plus-1 technology (that to an extent is also found in ‘Kal-El’): four regular cores and an additional low-power core to keep the device going while saving power when it’s not in use.





One of the areas where ‘Wayne’ offers a big improvement over ‘Kal-El’ in in the 72 graphics cores the chip will have which will offer a 6 times performance increase over ‘Kal-El’ and a 20 times increase over Tegra 2.

‘Wayne’ will feature a dual-channel memory controller that supports DDR3L, LPDDR2 and LPDDR3 RAM, with an eight-lane display serial interconnect (DSI) driver supporting a resolution of up to 2,560×1,600,1080p for 3D displays, or 4K resolution displays over HDMI.

In addition to the increased graphics cores, the slide also reveals that ‘Wayne’ will feature an ARM Cortex A-15 that, according to ARM’s press materials, features “over twice the performance of today’s top-of-the-line smartphones and over 4 times the aggregate performance of ARM processor-based infrastructure platforms.”

NVIDIA hasn’t yet announced a release date for Tegra 4, but with the Consumer Electronics Show just around the corner in January and the Mobile World Congress a month after it is likely the new chipset will make an appearance at one of these shows.