Nvidia
Since the worldwide chip shortage, it’s nearly difficult to get your hands on any Nvidia PC technology at all, but did you realise that Nvidia phones were formerly widely available? Low-power Nvidia chipsets have been used in a variety of smartphones and other portable devices in the past.
This, of course, refers to Nvidia’s Tegra family of processors, which competed against systems on a chip (SoCs) from Qualcomm, Samsung, and others back in the day. The various chipsets that power modern electronics like the Nintendo Switch and the Nvidia Shield may, in fact, be traced back to the earliest smartphones.
The Microsoft Zune HD from 2009 was the first consumer electronics device to have an Nvidia Tegra chipset. The first mobile device to use this family of processors was Microsoft’s Kin. Products weren’t huge sellers when they were released, but the company eventually saw some growth.
The Tegra 2 chipset was Nvidia’s follow-up to the Tegra 1 and included a more potent dual-core Arm Cortex-A9 CPU and extremely low power GeForce GPU. For a time, especially when compared to the standard single-core CPUs, the Tegra 2 was the undisputed king of Android performance. The Exynos 4 Dual from Samsung and the dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 later in the year quickly erased that advantage.
Although neither the Motorola Droid X2 nor the LG Optimus 2X were blockbuster hits in 2010, the chipset was a success inside of these Android-powered smartphones. A sizable number of additional smartphones, tablets, and even the odd notebook from different manufacturers were powered by the Tegra 2.
The Motorola Droid X2, LG Optimus 2X, Samsung Galaxy R, HTC One X, and Xiaomi Mi 3 are just few of the smartphones that use Nvidia’s Tegra chipset.
The Samsung Galaxy R from 2011 was one of the most notable Tegra 2-powered devices to hit the market. The Galaxy R was something of a Galaxy S2 spinoff, with features like the “Tegra Zone” app, which let users download games specialised for the smartphone. This concept, however, didn’t endure nearly as long as the Galaxy S2. Additionally, by 2011 standards, the chip was much less powerful than that of Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S2.
In 2011, Nvidia released the Tegra 3. This next-gen chipset was a vast improvement over its predecessor in terms of multimedia processing power, with a faster Nvidia GeForce GPU, a suite of video decoder technologies, and a quad-core Cortex-A9 CPU with NEON extensions.
The Tegra 2 chipset was Nvidia’s follow-up to the Tegra 1 and included a more potent dual-core Arm Cortex-A9 CPU and extremely low power GeForce GPU. For a time, especially when compared to the standard single-core CPUs, the Tegra 2 was the undisputed king of Android performance. The Exynos 4 Dual from Samsung and the dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 later in the year quickly erased that advantage.
Although neither the Motorola Droid X2 nor the LG Optimus 2X were blockbuster hits in 2010, the chipset was a success inside of these Android-powered smartphones. A sizable number of additional smartphones, tablets, and even the odd notebook from different manufacturers were powered by the Tegra 2.
The Motorola Droid X2, LG Optimus 2X, Samsung Galaxy R, HTC One X, and Xiaomi Mi 3 are just few of the smartphones that use Nvidia’s Tegra chipset.
The Samsung Galaxy R from 2011 was one of the most notable Tegra 2-powered devices to hit the market. The Galaxy R was something of a Galaxy S2 spinoff, with features like the “Tegra Zone” app, which let users download games specialised for the smartphone. This concept, however, didn’t endure nearly as long as the Galaxy S2. In addition, by 2011, the chip had fallen to the middle of the pack and was nowhere near as strong as the flagship Galaxy S2.
In 2011, Nvidia released the Tegra 3. An improved Nvidia GeForce GPU, a slew of video decoder technologies, and a quad-core Cortex-A9 CPU with NEON extensions made this next-gen chipset a formidable multimedia workhorse.
Several early-2010s Android devices were powered by Nvidia’s Tegra processor, but it wasn’t going to persist. Complexity of smartphone chipsets grew over time, pushing out the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) in favour of more powerful networking and co-processing features. Instead, Nvidia has refocused its chipset efforts on tablets, multimedia devices, and eventually portable game consoles.
The Tegra 4, released in 2013, was the first step in this direction, with a 72-core GPU arrangement that was 7x more powerful than the Tegra 3. Tegra 4 has been widely adopted in Android tablets due to its combination of four 1.9GHz Cortex-A15 CPU cores, a low power companion core, LPDDR3 memory, and a plethora of video hardware decoding blocks. In addition to the Xiaomi Mi 3, it powered the gaming-focused Nvidia Shield Portable and the yet-to-be-released Mad Catz Mojo.
The LG G2 Mini, the privacy-focused Silent Circle Blackphone, and a couple of Wiko Tegra 4 smartphones were all powered by a Tegra 4i variant with a quad Cortex-A9 CPU and 60-core GPU. However, the release of this chip effectively ended Nvidia’s smartphone plans.