Nvidia quad-core Tegra 3 chip to speed up tablets and smartphones

Tablets and smartphones will soon get quad-core processors with Nvidia’s new Tegra 3 chip, which will eclipse the application and graphics performance provided by dual-core processors found on tablets like Apple’s iPad and Motorola’s Xoom.

The Tegra 3 chip, announced this morning, is the first quad-core processor for tablets and smartphones, Nvidia said. Its performance will be five times better than Tegra 2, the dual-core predecessor found in tablets from Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Toshiba.

The chip, formerly code-named Kal El, will run at up to 1.3GHz in a quad-core configuration and appear in Asustek Computer’s Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet, which was announced earlier today. The Transformer Prime tablet will have 12 hours of battery with the help of a Tegra 3 chip, a Nvidia spokesman said.

GeForce graphics cores

Tegra 3 is based on the Cortex-A9 processor design from ARM, whose processor designs are found in most tablets and smartphones today. The chip will run Google’s Android OS. A Tegra 3 tablet with Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 was shown at the software giant’s Build conference in September. Smartphones with the chip are expected in the first quarter next year, an Nvidia spokesman said.
The chip combines CPU cores with a number of processing units for tablet and smartphone functions. It has 12 GeForce graphics cores, which could provide a massive multimedia performance boost. A low-power fifth core can run secondary tasks to reduce the processing strain on the four main CPUs. For example, the low-power fifth core is activated if a user wants to listen to music, and the four high-performance cores are shut down to extend device battery life, Nvidia said.
Though advertised at 12 hours, the battery life of devices like Asus’ Eee Pad Transformer Prime with Tegra 3 could vary with tasks, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

Qualcomm competition

“It’s going to depend on the workload. We’ll see once we get our hands on the hardware,” McCarron said. “The general rule of thumb is the more intense the workload, the less life you get out of the battery.”