Ahead of Tegra 4, NVIDIA's 'Grey' Tegra LTE Enabled Chip Powering Smartphones Soon

Every power user is looking forward to the launch of Tegra 4, and if recent reports prove accurate, Hewlett-Packard will be the first to showcase NVIDIA's upcoming powerhouse System-on-Chip (SoC) when it launches a high-end Android tablet. In the meantime, NVIDIA has another Tegra part up its sleeve codenamed "Grey."

Grey is a mainstream SoC with integrated 3G and 4G/LTE communication technologies baked in. Not a ton of details are known, though early reports suggest it might use ARM Cortex-A9 cores like Tegra 3, but consume less power, making it a good fit for smartphones.


Originally there was talk of Grey debuting towards the end of the year, but during a recent conference call with investors, NVIDIA chief Jen-Hsun Huang hinted at an early 2013 launch.

"We have a next-generation application processor integrated with a next-generation 4G/LTE. This quarter, we hope to tape out and race it to market," Huang said. "It is obviously a very, very large market opportunity for us, and so we are very bullish about it."

NVIDIA's quarter just ended, and if everything is still on schedule, you might see Grey-powered smartphones emerge within the next few months, and certainly by the time summer rolls around.