NVIDIA is apparently working on a Tegra X1-powered Shield tablet that should launch by the end of March, according to a new report.
The chipmaker announced its new Tegra X1 mobile SoC powerhouse back at the CES 2015 trade show in January, and the next Shield tablet may soon arrive with this processor under the hood. If the benchmarks that surfaced last month are anything to go by, the NVIDIA Tegra X1 outperforms most competing products.
The current NVIDIA Shield tablet based on the company's Tegra K1 chip made its debut back in July 2014 and proved to be quite popular, as it offers a plain Android experience, timely updates to new versions of Android, support for the Shield gaming hub, and more, all at a fairly reasonable price.
The 2015 NVIDIA Shield tablet based on the new Tegra X1 is expected to be even more powerful and exciting, and it could arrive within the next couple of months.
"Nvidia is working on a successor that is supposed to launch within a couple of months. We don't have any better date than that, but we do know that it will come soon. We expect announcement latest at the GPU technology conference scheduled for March 17th if not earlier. The same sources told us about the existence of the original Shield tablet months before launch," Fudzilla reports.
According to the publication, the next-generation Shield tablet will pack the mobile version of Maxwell technology with the new Tegra X1, which means a Maxwell 256-core graphics processing unit (GPU), DX-12, NVIDIA CUDA, OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL ES 3.1, as well as AEP support.
"Let's not forget that Tegra X1 is based on an octa-core 64-bit ARM CPU, with four Cortex-A57 2MB L2 cores and another four Cortex-A53 512KB L2 cores. Tegra X1 supports H.265, VP9 4K 60 fps Video 4k H.265, 4k VP9, 4k H.264 - pretty much all codecs that matter and that they will matter for the 4K in the future," Fudzilla further points out.
"With display support up to 4K x 2K @60 Hz or 1080p @120 Hz HDMI 2.0 60 fps, HDCP 2.2 we expect the Tegra X1 based Shield might shape up to be a great tablet for niche users looking for high performance."
It remains unclear at this point just what other specifications this next-generation NVIDIA Shield tablet will pack, but the report further speculates that it may feature an 8-inch display and come in an LTE version as well.
No other information is available for now, but we'll keep you up to date as soon as we learn more. In the meantime, make sure to take all such leaks and reports with a grain of salt.
