Nvidia and Qualcomm are looking to bring quad-core processors to the mobile world.
Nvidia officials at the Mobile World Congress 2011
in Barcelona not only demonstrated its upcoming “Kal-El” chip, which
couples the four computing cores with a new 12-core GeForce GPU, but
also laid out a roadmap through 2014 that will offer almost 100 times
the processing power of the current dual-core Tegra 2.
Nvidia’s announcement came a day after unveiled
“Krait,” the next chip in the Snapdragon portfolio that officials said
will offer speeds of up to 2.5GHz, one-, two- and four-core versions,
and 150 percent more performance than current CPU cores based on
designs from ARM Holdings. It also will offer up to 65 percent lower
power, they said.
“Just as the original Snapdragon revolutionized
smartphones with the first 1GHz processor, these new generations of
Snapdragon will revolutionize the next wave of mobile entertainment and
computing,” Steve Mollenkopf, executive vice president and group
president for Qualcomm, said in a statement.
The announcements come a year after Nvidia
released its highly successful dual-core Tegra 2 chipset for mobile
phones. Kal-El (Superman’s name on his home planet of Krypton — future
generations also will have super hero-related nicknames) and its four
cores are aimed at a wide variety of handheld devices, as well as
tablet PCs. The new chip will enable Web browsing two times faster than
the current dual-core Tegra 2, with triple the graphics performance,
according to the company.
For more, read the eWeek article: Nvidia, Qualcomm Promise Quad-Core Mobile Chips.