During the 2013 Mobile World Congress, NVidia boasted that its Tegra 4 system-on-a-chip (SoC) is "the world's fastest mobile processor".
Tegra is indeed a powerful little beast with its 72 GPU processing units and four cores running at 1.9 GHz to handle graphically-intensive applications and a low-power "companion core" to handle less demanding tasks. But Qualcomm remains unphased.
After noting that his company is "more focused on shipping products" than refuting NVidia’s unsubstantiated claims, Qualcomm's Senior VP of Product Management, Raj Talluri, affirmed that their Snapdragon 800 will beat Tegra 4 "easily" in "most" benchmarks.
Snapdragon 800 sports four cores running at 2.3 GHz and its die size is quite larger than that of Tegra 4, so it is plausible to expect it to consume more power. But Talluri claims that this is offset by Tegra 4’s lack of on-die LTE modem.
Eitherway, NVidia has already announced its plans to release a refined Tegra 4 later this year. NVidia’s new SoC will carry the moniker "Tegra 4i". It will run at 2.3 GHz and will sport an on-die LTE modem. Whether Tegra 4i will outperform Snaprdragon 800 or not remains to be seen, but it is almost certain that it will be more power efficient thanks to NVidia’s 28nm semiconductor manufacturing technology.
