Nvidia, best known for its prowess in the GPU market, has also seen its share of other gaming products outside of providing PC gamers with high end graphics cards. One of these products is the Nvidia Shield, a set-top box and microconsole capable of playing downloaded games and streaming available ones from your PC, all running on Android.
The latest model of these neat Android TV devices was released back in 2017, and if rumors are to be believed, it would seem that we may see a 2019 model coming out soon. According to XDA Developers, this newest Nvidia Shield Android TV will get a brand new Tegra X1 chip, plus other refreshed hardware to make for a more powerful streaming microconsole. Check out the spec sheet below.
- Codename – ‘mdarcy’
- RAM – 3072MB
- SOC (System on Chip) – Nvidia Tegra X1 T210
- CPU – 4x ARM Cortex-A57 running at 1900 MHz; 4x ARM Cortex-A53 running at 1300 MHz
- GPU – Nvidia Maxwell running at 1000 MHz
- SDK – Android 9 Pie (SDK 28)
Looking at the specs, one of the things that noticeably pops out at first is the fact that this Shield will almost certainly be a refresh rather than a new model. The 2017 Nvidia Shield is codenamed ‘darcy,’ while this one is named ‘mdarcy’. The device will also be running the latest Android 9 Pie, which is higher than the Android 8 Oreo the current Nvidia Shield offers. There have been numerous previews for Android 9 Pie for the 2017 Nvidia Shield model, which makes sense that testing is already underway for this upcoming refresh model.
XDA Developers also spoke with a few Tegra kernel developers to find out that ‘mdarcy’ is more or less pretty much the same as the ‘darcy,’ save for the fact that it’s running on Linux kernel 4.14 with a t210b01 SoC – which is reportedly a refresh model on the existing Tegra. This newer Tegra X1 will reportedly have better power usage and higher maximum GPU clock speed, but it remains to be seen what specific model will be used with this Shield Android TV.
In any case, expect more coverage from us as soon as more news is available.
