NVIDIA Will Ship Tegra 4 in May, Project Shield by July

Yesterday during his company’s earnings call NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said the company will start to ship Tegra 4 chips to manufacturers in fiscal Q2 2014 which begins in May, according to Xbit Labs.

Huang said the company will ship Tegra 4 chips to its partners early in its second financial quarter. That means companies like Asus, Vizio and HTC will get the new System on Chip in May 2013 at the earliest. That means those manufacturers won’t have the chance to release devices using the new processor until later this year.

Shipping the Tegra 4 to partners in May could mean that smartphones and tablets won’t make it to market until sometime in August or September. That doesn’t apply to NVIDIA’s Project Shield, however.

During the earnings call Huang said NVIDIA will ship the Tegra 4-based Project Shield “in the latter part of Q2.” He then reiterated the console will ship in that quarter. Given that timeframe the NVIDIA Project Shield will come to market by July 2013. Such a release windows gives the company a chance to show off the console one last time before it ships at E3 in June.

Huang didn’t discuss the price of the Project Shield, only giving a release window for the console. If NVIDIA decides to price the console competitively with the Nintendo 3DS XL and the Sony PlayStation Vita it will likely cost in the range of $200 to $250.

The new NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor has four A15 cores plus another low-power core for less intensive tasks. To improve gaming performance the SoC also includes 72 graphics cores which should result in better looks games and faster processes overall. The Tegra 4 is also the first processor from NVIDIA that can use 4G LTE, which means it will likely appear in more smartphones in the U.S.

The NVIDIA Tegra 4 also has new features that help users take photos faster. The new processor can help devices take HDR photos in just 0.2 seconds, and take HDR video in real-time.