NVIDIA Tegra 3+ and Tegra 4 Wayne Already Sampling to OEMs

Tegra 3 will be the core of NVIDIA's tablet and smartphone strategy this year, but the Tegra 3+ and Tegra 4 have, apparently, already been completed.

If we are to go by what VR-Zone claims to have found out at this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC 2012), two of NVIDIA's upcoming Tegra iterations are already sampling to OEM partners.

That is to say, the Wayne and the Tegra 3+ T35 are already far enough along in development that the Santa Clara company is shipping them to tablet and phone makers, so that they can come up with products.

T35 is the refreshed Tegra 3, hence its Tegra 3+ moniker. It is basically the Kal-El with higher clock speeds, for use in what VR-Zone calls Windows and ARM “clamshells.”

With frequencies of 1.6 GHz and 1.7 GHz, the SoCs may wind up in tablet/notebook hybrids running Android, in addition to regular slates.

Nevertheless, the Wayne T40 (Tegra 4) is the platform that NVIDIA appears to be most focused on.

The company actually taped it out last year, in December (2011). Now that the chips are finally back from production, NVIDIA is shipping them to interested parties.

T40 is based on the 28nm manufacturing process technology and uses several ARM Cortex-A15 cores, plus a new graphics engine that, chances are, supports CUDA.

NVIDIA will likely adopt the same tactic as it did for the Tegra 3: let one company debut products powered by it and only later open the floodgates.

That means that, while some tablets and smartphones will appear at CES 2013, mass adoption and availability won't be reached until the second or third quarter of the year.

All that remains is for baseband functionality to be integrated into the Wayne, or shipped alongside it. Without such a feature, the Santa Clara company risks losing most design wins to Qualcomm, even if its platform is superior in every other aspect.

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