News: NVIDIA announces quad-core chips for Tablets, coming this August

It feels like dual core chips of Tegra 2 were just announced last month and we are still getting used to fact that the next series of mobile handsets or tablets will be powered by dual core chips. We all knew that this was not going to stay this way for long, but NVIDIA just announced the quad-core chips today for tablets and this could come by this August.

NVIDIA announced the quad-core chip, internally called as Kal-El and may be finally marketed as NVIDIA Tegra 3. The announcement from NVIDIA was coupled with a development demo of the device to show its power in scaling down a video stream and simultaneously broadcasting to an additional display at different resolutions. 

As per NVIDIA this chip should provide double the processing power of Tegra 2 that is currently used in the tablets launched / announced. This will also boast three times the graphical crunching power of Tegra 2. In another simulation this chipset was able to handle a game running at 720p with 650 enemy soldiers being rendered. 

The post from Engadget shows the roadmap of NVIDIA in which by 2014 they are expecting to release chips that can be 100 times powerful than the devices that the current generation phones can handle. When I mean current generation, this will be the phones announced last month, not the iPhone or Android phones from few months back, as they are obsolete by these standards.

The question now comes down to the power optimization features of these multi-core chipsets. The processing power is all good, but there is no quantum leap being made in battery technology. So at this rate, the battery life of devices are moving from days, to day, to hours and with this may be to minutes. May be we will have multiple battery packs to power these devices. 

Author: Vinod

Source: Engadget