Xiaomi Mi3 Announced As First NVIDIA Tegra 4 Powered Android Smartphone

MojoKid writes "NVIDIA's Tegra 4 SoC is destined for devices beyond NVIDIA's own SHIELD gaming handheld. In fact, ASUS stepped out with the Tegra 4-powered Transformer Pad TF701T just yesterday and today Xiaomi steps out with the 5-inch Mi3 Android smartphone, also powered by Tegra 4. Here in the US Xiaomi might not roll right off the tongue but the Chinese manufacturer is making some serious inroads as of late and attracting top talent to boot. The new Xiaomi Mi3 is based on a 5-inch IPS display with a full HD 1080p resolution, 2GB of RAM, 64GB of on-board storage and a 13MP camera. NVIDIA's Tegra 4, with its quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU and 72 GeForce GPU cores ought to make the device feel rather nimble, especially with gaming and multimedia. If the Mi3 handles anything like SHIELD did in the benchmarks, it could be the Android phone to beat on the test track in the coming weeks."

Comments

Ummm...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Didn't the NVIDIA Shield have a cooling fan and a couple of giant vents to keep the Tegra 4 happy? How much lower are the clocks going to be on a phone?

Re:Ummm...

[gman003]

According to Wikipedia, this is clocked only 100MHz lower (1.8GHz, not 1.9GHz as in the Shield). I strongly suspect thermal or TDP limits will throttle that if more than one core is used. For most things, I doubt it'll even kick in the "actual" cores, preferring to run on just the low-power 800MHz "companion core".

Nexus 4 Alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

At a supposed price of $327, and as an unlocked android phone, I'd say this is pretty stiff competition for the Nexus 4... I certainly would consider buying one if I didn't already have a N4. Curious to see how the batter holds up.

Re:Nexus 4 Alternative?

[ozmanjusri]

At a supposed price of $327, and as an unlocked android phone, I'd say this is pretty stiff competition for the Nexus 4.

Xiaomi should be scaring the pants of established phone makers. Their Hongmi (Red Rice) phone has a quad-core 1.2Ghz SoC with 4.7-inch 312ppi IPS display and is selling for $130. Even at that price, it looks like they'll have healthy profit margins - TrendForce says their BOM is only $85.

http://www.slashgear.com/chinese-xiaomi-red-rice-smartphone-has-85-bom-30295442/

Re:Nexus 4 Alternative?

[ifiwereasculptor]

Cortex A7 cores, though. And clocked pretty low. The four of them together amount probably to about one and a half 1.8GHz Krait cores or thereabouts.

Re:Nexus 4 Alternative?

[TheRaven64]

Cortex A7 is not ARM's flagship performance chip, but it's pretty respectable. It's basically a tweaked Cortex A8, with the instruction decoder updated to be compatible with the A15 extensions and the layout optimised for better power consumption. It's still in-order, but it's dual-dispatch and gets similar performance to the A8 clock-for-clock in a much lower power envelope. My current phone has a single-core 1GHz Cortex A8, and it's starting to feel a little slow for a few things, but it's not exactly crawling.

The Krait is an A15, which does have a much higher IPC than the A7, but at the expense of power consumption. Four A7 cores, at the same clock speed, will draw slightly less power than one A15 core. For a tablet, I'd definitely be more interested in an A15 (or a big.LITTLE with both), but for a phone the A7 is probably a better choice.

Re:1080p on a 5 inch display..

[Falkentyne]

Why?

The same reason why you need 2560x1600 on a 13" Macbook Pro... because.

Re:1080p on a 5 inch display..

[BronsCon]

As someone with a 4.7" 1080p display, I can tell you exactly why. It's friggin' beautiful, even without anti-aliasing. And skipping anti-aliasing means more performance with less power from your GPU. While a 5" display won't look quite as nice, slightly fewer dots per inch and all, I'm betting it'll still be damn beautiful.

Re:1080p on a 5 inch display..

[dfghjk]

720p at 5" is "friggin' beautiful" as well and takes far less processing to fill meaning a REAL savings in GPU power over 1080p.

People who claim to see a difference between 440 dpi and 470 dpi in a phone are liars.

Not at all difficult to pronounce

[Zontar The Mindless]

The 'X' is pronounced more or less like English 'sh', and 'ao' is the same as the 'ow' in English 'how'. So it's 'shyow-mee'. First syllable's a high rising tone, second is low rising. For an English speaker, if you simply stress the first syllable, that's close enough.

It means 'millet' (a type of grain--nothing to do with the French painter).

Re:Bait and Switch

[Clsid]

I was able to find a Xioami phone without all the trouble you are mentioning. When they just came out, of course it was hard to find even if they create an artificial outage, but the same is true of the new HTC One. Samsung is the only company that I have seen that has this massive availability for their products after they are announced.

In any case, pretty cool phone and even though I hated Android mods (unless it is Cyanogenmod), this is one to look for since it is very well done. Btw, even if you sign up for a 1 year contract, I feel like in China that is a better deal, since you pay say, 1000 yuan, they give you the phone and then you don't have to pay monthly fees for the whole year. Oh and they also gave me a sim card for my iPad for free the first 3 months, and after that it is 5 yuan per month. I honestly believe you cannot find such a deal in the States.