If Nvidia designed a smartphone, is this what it would look like?

Has Nvidia designed a phone? Well, yes and no...

What you're looking at (below) is what Nvidia calls the Phoenix reference design for its new Tegra 4i chip.

Unlike the main Tegra 4 chip - which is designed to provide the highest performance for tablets and super-smartphones - the Tegra 4i is a smaller, cheaper version of its big brother.

Basically, Nvidia's looking to get its chips into mass market smartphones for the first time, and that's why it's come up with the Tegra 4i.

But that's not to say Tegra 4i isn't a cool piece of technology.

For one thing it uses the same GPU cores as the Tegra 4, only it features 60 instead of 72. It also has the same HDR photography chip, something Nvidia calls Chimera.

And it uses the same CPU philosophy as the Tegra 4, in that there's a 2.3 GHz quad-core CPU, backed with a single core CPU, which will extend your phone's battery life by using the single core when the quad-core isn't required.

As for the CPU itself, the Tegra 4 uses an ARM Cortex A15, while the Tegra 4i uses a revised version of the Cortex A9 design used in the Tegra 3.

The result is a much smaller - and hence cheaper - chip design, although Nvidia is keen to point out that per square mm of silicon, the Tegra 4i is more powerful than the Tegra 4 (and all its rival chip makers' designs too).

As for that Phoenix reference phone, it's a full smartphone design - a 8 mm thick Android device with a 5-inch/1080p touchscreen - that's designed to be a starting point for phone makers to modify for their own devices.

Of course, if they wanted to, they could put it directly into production but that would be rather boring.

Either which way, Nvidia expects the first smartphones using Tegra 4i to be available by the end of 2013, although they won't be available in volume until Q1 2014.