Nvidia has finally confirmed their plans to release the ARM-based Tegra 3 chip, bringing quad-core processing to tablets and possibly smartphones in the future.
General manager of mobile business Michael Rayfield would not give a time frame, however, just saying the chips will make an appearance "soon."
Speculation is the company will show off the designs at next month's Mobile World Congress Expo.
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They should first try to make dual-core CPU's for phones as efficient as possible before jumping up to Quad-Core. But it is nice to see this industry is still improving. Samsung Orion and Qualcomm?s upcoming Snapdragons better not disappoint, especially since they are so late in the "Dual-core" game right now, and Nvidia is just milking all of the attention. Tegra 3 is supposed to come out no later than 1 year after Tegra 2 is released.
...And Tegra 4 will be the year after that. Every year they will add a core, and they will increase the speed of said cores in the time between. Personally, I am very happy to see a quad core ARM processor.
The only thing I see is how much a hit on battery life will it take on smartphones/tablets? Remember the more you have of an item or items, the more battery life you will sacrifice to get the performance you want, even if you can limit the power consumption, there's always a limit.
Originally posted by blueboy09: The only thing I see is how much a hit on battery life will it take on smartphones/tablets? Remember the more you have of an item or items, the more battery life you will sacrifice to get the performance you want, even if you can limit the power consumption, there's always a limit.
There is plenty of room for improvements in the manufacturing process. Right now the Tegra 2 is a 40nm processor but future iterations will see die shrinks, which, of course, help conserve battery life by reducing the power draw.
Intel, for example, currently uses a 32nm process, soon to have 22nm process, and eventually 11nm.
