When Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said we might see $199 Tegra 3 tablets this summer, he wasn’t speculating idly. Nvidia has revealed that it’s working on just such a tablet: Kai. At the company’s annual meeting of investors last week, VP Rob Csonger revealed the idea, and explained Kai isn’t just a piece of hardware, but a plan to democratize its quad-core Tegra 3 system-on-chip. Nvidia wants to offer Android 4.0 tablets that are more powerful than the Kindle Fire at the same price point, he said:
Nvidia reveals Kai: a platform for building quad-core Android 4.0 tablets priced at $199 (update 2)
When Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said we might see $199 Tegra 3 tablets this summer, he wasn’t speculating idly. The company has revealed that it’s working on just such a tablet: Kai.
When Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said we might see $199 Tegra 3 tablets this summer, he wasn’t speculating idly. The company has revealed that it’s working on just such a tablet: Kai.
is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
Our strategy on Android is simply to enable quad-core tablets running Android Ice Cream Sandwich to be developed and brought out to market at the $199 price point, and the way we do that is a platform we’ve developed called Kai. So this uses a lot of the secret sauce that’s inside Tegra 3 to allow you to develop a tablet at a much lower cost, by using a lot of innovation that we’ve developed to reduce the power that’s used by the display and use lower cost components within the tablet.
Does that make Kai a reference design? Probably yes, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also a consumer product. Nvidia and Asus teamed up at CES 2012 to introduce a quad-core tablet with a then-unheard-of $250 price point, the ME370T, and it’s a dead ringer for the Kai in the picture above. We haven’t heard a thing about the ME370T since CES, but perhaps it’s on the way, and if we’re lucky, it’s the first of a whole new wave of affordable Tegra 3 slates. Maybe Google’s Nexus tablet will be among them.
Update: Nvidia didn’t have much to add when we asked them about Kai, but told us that devices are already inbound: “Customers are using the Kai platform to build Tegra 3 tablets now.”
Update 2: At the company’s 2012 investor day, Nvidia revealed a few more hints. Kai will use cheaper DDR3L memory — “we’re the only SOC in production that supports DDR3L,” said Nvidia — and both the DirectTouch and Prism low-power display technologies that the company announced at CES. We should see the first tablets on sale this summer, the company said.
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