At the Mobile World Congress show, Nvidia and Qualcomm both unveiled planned quad-core mobile chips for smartphones and tablets.
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 the 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 the unveiling of "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.
At
the MWC, Nvidia officials reportedly demonstrated the four-core Tegra chip
powering a prototype tablet running Google's Android operating system. Among
the tasks demonstrated by the tablet was a 1440p video content streamed on a
2560-x-1600 panel and played in real time. Another demo, showing off the
capabilities of the 12-core GPU, was a scene of the computer game "Great
Battles Medieval," which reportedly ran without a hitch.
In
a blog
post Feb. 15, Michael Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia's Mobile Business
Unit, said customers are getting samples of the next-generation Tegra chip now,
and that products containing the chip should start going into production by
August.
Along
with Kal-El, Nvidia officials also gave a glimpse of the company's Tegra
roadmap, with future chips codenamed "Wayne," "Logan" and "Stark," coming out
one per year over the next three years. It's Stark (from Ironman fame) that
will offer up to 75 times improvement over the current Tegra 2, according to
Rayfield.
"You
might well ask, What on earth can be done with nearly 75x improvement in
performance over Tegra 2 that Stark will provide in 2014?" he asked in his blog
"Our customers and partners have already indicated that they're confident they
can use everything we give them."
For
Qualcomm, its Krait quad-core chipset-also announced at MWC-is expected to
start appearing in products in early 2012. The lineup will include the
single-core MSM8930, dual-core MSM8960 and quad-core APQ8064. They all will
offer multiple connectivity options-WiFi, Bluetooth and FM-and support for NFC
(near-field communication) and every major operating system and product,
according to Qualcomm.
The
portfolio will be coupled with the Adreno 320 quad-core GPU, which the company
said will offer 15 times the performance original Adreno graphics chip.
Qualcomm reportedly also has said the quad-core chip not only will have better
performance, but also better battery life. Tasks will be split between the
cores, which will enable better performance without impacting power consumption
as much.
Samples
of the dual-core MSM8960 will be available in the second quarter, according to
Qualcomm, while samples of the single- and quad-core chips will head out in
early 2012.
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