
Shrinking IT Softly
Hardware radios are a headache for all smartphone makers, they often need to be different for various regions, causing production line complications, they take up space and are not easy to upgrade. Software-defined radio, in short, allows code to control the smart antennas in a phone, code which can be rewritten and updated as users move between regions and as technology improves.
Which is why most of the major suppliers of radios for smartphones have been working on SDR to address those issues, and help in the always-on battle to reduce costs, product size and power usage. Nvidia is first out the traps with Tegra 4i that supports LTE and the various HSPA versions used by the likes of AT&T and T-Mobile.

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Tegra vs. SnapDragon vs. Intel
Formerly known as Project Grey, Nvidia's solution delivers an ARM-core based Tegra 4 chip featuring the R4 Cortex-A9 CPU, plus a fifth battery saver core. It packs in a version of the Nvidia i500 LTE modem optimized for a highly power efficient, compact, high-performance component. This puts it on slightly ahead of Qualcomm's own integrated chips, but probably not for long.
No partners who will using the processor are mentioned, but Nvidia has the new Phoenix reference design ready to go and will be showing its wares at Mobile World Congress later this month. The 4i chip does have fewer GPU cores than the full Tegra 4 chip, but for superphone-class devices, the SDR part is an option on the "Wayne" chip shown above.