NVIDIA CEO: $199 Tegra 3 tablets could be a reality by summer
At CES NVIDIA and ASUS unveiled a 7-inch tablet with a quad-core Tegra 3 processor. The specs aren’t exactly special at this point in the game, but the pricing model was. The new slate would be hitting shelves at $250. Since then, rumors of the device becoming a Nexus-branded ASUS tablet in partnership with Google have mucked things up a bit, potentially driving the price to as low as $150 while sacrificing certain hardware elements that may or may not include the Tegra 3 chipset.
Whether or not a Nexus tablet launches, and regardless of if it holds the power of four cores, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang still sees affordable Tegra 3 options in the very near future. He predicts tablets utilizing the chipset could come to market by summer at a price of only $200. Other expensive hardware elements (memory, display) would take a hit, so we wouldn’t be getting a Transformer Pad Infinity at that price, but that’s the tradeoff for squeezing the margins as much as possible.
Does the prediction of NVIDIA biggest of wigs lend credence to the Nexus tablet rumors? Does it suggest other things altogether like an updated Kindle Fire with quad-core processing? I guess we’ll be finding out soon enough. Summer is right around the corner.
[via The Verge]