Nvidia’s Faster Tegra 3+ Coming Soon with LTE

Like we reported earlier, Nvidia is working hard on the new Tegra 3+ ARM low-power processing unit. Although a lot of Nvidia’s engineers are already busy with Tegra 4, the Tegra 3+ team is now going to put the Nvidia Icera to good use together with the new CPU.

The launch date of the new Tegra 3+ upgrade is approaching, but the main things that are still holding it back are TSMC and the multiple Tegra 3 devices already in stock. TSMC has improved the yield of their 28 nm manufacturing line, but the company is having difficulty in supplying enough chips, as the demand for AMD’s GCN GPUs, Nvidia’s Kepler and Qualcomm’s S4, is very high. The Taiwan-based foundry has promised to make Nvidia a priority for the 28 nm manufacturing line and it probably did, but a 200 MHz higher clock was not enough to make Tegra 3 + appealing.

Therefore, Nvidia is likely to bring the Icera LTE technology together with the new and improved Tergra 3+. LTE is very popular in the United States and Nvidia wants to capitalize on that. There is great demand for low-power LTE-capable platforms in the US. In fact, Nvidia is practically shut out of the LTE smartphone market, as Qualcomm’s S4 is currently the high-performance low-power CPU of choice for 2012 smartphone designs.

Sure, the California-based GPU designer is not just after smartphones, but it is also planning Tegra 3+ LTE tablets that, in fact, are already being certified by the FCC. One example of such a tablet is the TransformerPad TF300TL that we’ve already reported about. Tegra 3+ is reportedly coming with an increased maximum clock frequency of around 1700 MHz.

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