We may just be beginning to see the fruits of the dual-core processors in smartphones and tablets on the marketbut that has’t stopped the chip manufacturers from pushing on with future upgrades, and NVIDIA is looking to start shipping quad-core Kal El tablets by August.
With a large proportion of tablet and smartphone users still on single-core devices, NVIDIA appears to have reduced their product cycle to an impressively short 6-months leaving consumers with an option to leapfrog over a dual-core upgrade, straight to multi-core. It seems they believe that having a 4 month headstart on their competitors will be worth more in the long run than selling volumes of their current chips, a choice which will definitely heat up the competition pushing progress forward and prices down for consumers – something no-one will be complaining about.
To show off the prowess of their new chips, NVIDIA have created a game that makes use of true dynamic lighting and detailed physics at high frame-rates, a video of which you can see below. And that is made on a Android Honeycomb tablet using pre-production silicon, so things should be about 10-30% faster when the chips finally make it to market. Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Marvell and others must be getting a little concerned.