Xiaomi Mi3 Announced As First NVIDIA Tegra 4 Powered Android Smartphone 52
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA's Tegra 4 SoC is destined for devices beyond NVIDIA's own SHIELD gaming handheld. In fact, ASUS stepped out with the Tegra 4-powered Transformer Pad TF701T just yesterday and today Xiaomi steps out with the 5-inch Mi3 Android smartphone, also powered by Tegra 4. Here in the US Xiaomi might not roll right off the tongue but the Chinese manufacturer is making some serious inroads as of late and attracting top talent to boot. The new Xiaomi Mi3 is based on a 5-inch IPS display with a full HD 1080p resolution, 2GB of RAM, 64GB of on-board storage and a 13MP camera. NVIDIA's Tegra 4, with its quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU and 72 GeForce GPU cores ought to make the device feel rather nimble, especially with gaming and multimedia. If the Mi3 handles anything like SHIELD did in the benchmarks, it could be the Android phone to beat on the test track in the coming weeks."
Ummm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nexus 4 Alternative? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nexus 4 Alternative? (Score:5, Interesting)
At a supposed price of $327, and as an unlocked android phone, I'd say this is pretty stiff competition for the Nexus 4.
Xiaomi should be scaring the pants of established phone makers. Their Hongmi (Red Rice) phone has a quad-core 1.2Ghz SoC with 4.7-inch 312ppi IPS display and is selling for $130. Even at that price, it looks like they'll have healthy profit margins - TrendForce says their BOM is only $85.
http://www.slashgear.com/chinese-xiaomi-red-rice-smartphone-has-85-bom-30295442/ [slashgear.com]
Re:Nexus 4 Alternative? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cortex A7 is not ARM's flagship performance chip, but it's pretty respectable. It's basically a tweaked Cortex A8, with the instruction decoder updated to be compatible with the A15 extensions and the layout optimised for better power consumption. It's still in-order, but it's dual-dispatch and gets similar performance to the A8 clock-for-clock in a much lower power envelope. My current phone has a single-core 1GHz Cortex A8, and it's starting to feel a little slow for a few things, but it's not exactly crawling.
The Krait is an A15, which does have a much higher IPC than the A7, but at the expense of power consumption. Four A7 cores, at the same clock speed, will draw slightly less power than one A15 core. For a tablet, I'd definitely be more interested in an A15 (or a big.LITTLE with both), but for a phone the A7 is probably a better choice.