NVIDIA “Kai” Platform To Let Manufacturers Hit $200 Quad-Core Tablet Mark?
NVIDIA had some interesting things to say about Android tablets back at the beginning of April, looking towards a future where it saw quad-core devices falling to the $200 mark. That sounded more than a little optimistic, especially if overall build quality was to remain high, but CEO Jen-Hsun Huang seemed quite enthusiastic about it becoming a possible reality. Now we’re starting to see just what the company was talking about, upon revealing its Kai reference design.
According to NVIDIA, Kai leverages the abilities of the Tegra 3 to allow manufacturers to put together tablet designs that hit minimal price points. It doesn’t sound like Kai is necessarily any big hardware change, but more along the lines of NVIDIA helping manufacturers reduce reliance on other components by getting the most out of the Tegra 3.
Of course, the big question is how this Kai design will translate over to a commercial product, and we might not have all that long to wait before we find out. There’s some speculation that tablets that have already been revealed to the public, like the ASUS ME370T, may be based on Kai designs. Beyond that, though, NVIDIA says that manufacturers are already creating Kai-based tablets of their own; from the sound of things, we could be seeing some in just a matter of months.