Asustek and Nvidia Corp. have demonstrated an affordable tablet with Nvidia Tegra 3 system-on-chip with rich multimedia capabilities and powered by Google Android 4 “Ice Cream Sandwich” operating system. The low-cost 7” tablet with Tegra 3 will redefine the market of cost-efficient slates thanks to its broad set of capabilities.

Asus ME370T, which will sport Nvidia Tegra 3 SoC as well as 7” screen with 1280*800 resolution, will sell for $249. The device will also feature Google Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” and will therefore be better than comparable low-cost tablets from little-known manufacturers as well as Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet, which cost in the range between $199 and $249, thanks to considerably better hardware and more compatible operating system.

Asustek and Nvidia did not unveil when exactly the new tablet will be available, but the showcase proves that the product is real and will likely be released about a quarter from now. Besides, the companies also did not reveal additional specs of the ME370T tablet, such as RAM and NAND flash capacities, support for 3G and other peculiarities. Still, given specs of Tegra 3, the slate will be multimedia oriented.

Nvidia Tegra 3 "Kal-El" system-on-chip (SoC) is based on four high-performance Cortex-A9 general-purpose cores with Neon accelerators (1.4GHz single-core or 1.30GHz quad-core mode) and one power-optimized Cortex-A9 core (up to 500MHz), features a GeForce graphics processing unit with twelve stream processors and will have a new display and video engines capable of supporting Blu-ray disc video playback and stereo-3D graphics output. The new device integrates single-channel DDR3L-1500/LPDDR2-1066 memory controller, e.MMC 4.41, SD 3.0, SATA II, 7.1-channel audio controller, faster image signal processor and so on. According to Nvidia's own performance benchmarks, Tegra 3 is 50% - 200%+ faster than Tegra 2 in various applications.

 According to Nvidia, massively improved general-purpose and graphics processing performance will enable Tegra 3 devices to provide massively improved web browsing experience, richer applications, fastest multitasking along with console-like video gaming experience. Along with other improvements, Tegra 3 supports output to HDTVs (via HDMI 1.4 output) as well as third-party controllers (via USB and other inputs).

Tags: ASUS, Nvidia, Tegra, Kal El, ARM