ZTE to Build Tegra 4 Smartphone, Working on i500 Based Design As Well
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 20, 2013 8:00 PM ESTZTE just announced that it would be building a Tegra 4 based smartphone for the China market in the first half of 2013. Given NVIDIA's recent statements about Tegra 4 shipping to customers in Q2, I would expect that this is going to be very close to the middle of the year. ZTE didn't release any specs other than to say that it's building a Tegra 4 phone.
Separately, ZTE and NVIDIA are also working on another phone that uses NVIDIA's i500 LTE baseband.
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jjj - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
"Separately, ZTE and NVIDIA are also working on another phone that uses NVIDIA's i500 LTE baseband"The baseband comes with Tegra 4 so they are building 2 Tegra 4 phones then.
Brian Klug - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
Yes it does come separately without Tegra 4.i500 is sold discretely, or inside Tegra 4i. Tegra 4 has no free i500 that comes with it.
-Brian
jjj - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
No you don't get it,they don't sell the i500 without Tegra 4 , i highly doubt they even bothered enabling it to work with anything else.Rayb - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
What part of sold discretely don't you get?It is a baseband modem that you can tweak with software to support GSM/EDGE/WCDMA/LTE, with or without a T4.
jjj - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
it is sold discretely but not without T4 lol and as proven here most have no idea that's the caseBrian Klug - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
That is just not the case at all. You can buy an i500 and attach it to whatever SoC you want over HSIC/USB2.0-Brian
jjj - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
since we can't edit i got to double post with the proof:JHH says - " We don’t sell the modem separately. It's sold as a kit. It's sold with Tegra 4. "
source here towards the end http://seekingalpha.com/article/1182501-nvidia-cor...
rocketbuddha - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
There are 2 distinct products referred as "Tegra 4".The one launched in CES during JAN13 is the result of the "Wayne" project. It has 2 discrete components.
a) The SOC containing 4+1 of the ARM Cortex A15 cores.+ 72 GPU cores
b) A separate baseband discrete chipset icera i500 to pair with the LTE/WCDMA capabilities.
a) and b) would be ideal for the US LTE market and NVIDIA to grow independent of Qualcomm. For tablets it can survive purely with a)
The one lauched a couple of days back is the result of "Grey" project. Here there is single SOC that integrates
4+1 ARM Cortex A9 cores + 60 GPU cores + LTE/WCDMA capable modem.
So what ZTE means is that it will have products that will be made from both Wayne and Grey families.
jjj - Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - link
the quote is "Tegra 4 also enables worldwide 4G LTE voice and data support through an optional chipset, the NVIDIA i500 processor. ZTE and NVIDIA are also planning a new LTE super phone using the i500 LTE chipset for blazing-fast networking. "So it seems it is not based on Grey but on Tegra 4 .
Brian Klug - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link
Here's a quote as well, from NVIDIA:“It’s a business decision. We can certainly support customers if they just want to use i500 separately.”
So you can buy an i500 discretely.
-Brian