Mobile Processors Go Quad-Core, Awesome Gaming to Come

According to Michael Rayfield, NVIDIA General Manager, Mobile Business Unit:

Project Kal-El came into the building, shepherded by a team of engineers from around the world, who had been working around the clock for months.  For the uninitiated, the entrance that I’m referring to was by none other than the next generation of our Tegra super chip.

This week at Mobile World Congress (MWC), NVIDIA demonstrated this little beauty running in an Android tablet. They showed it browsing the Web, running games and streaming amazing video. This wasn’t your average amazing video. It was 1440p video content running on a 2560x1600 panel. That will enable mobile devices to output to the highest resolution monitors or tablets equipped with a 10.1-inch display with 300 DPI.

This is the first mobile quad-core processor. And it contains a new 12 core GeForce GPU. Products are set for production in August. We should be hearing about them shortly.

Quad-core mobile processing is simply amazing. We have gone from phones to smartphones to what NVIDIA are calling superphones (hence the Superman Kal-El project moniker). It seems that NIVIDIA have suddenly become comic book fans with Wayne (Bruce Wayne, Batman), Logan (Wolverine) and Stark (Tony Stark, Iron Man) being the names of all of their upcoming projects.

Just when we thought dual-core mobile processors were cool, we get doubled up again. Moore’s law claims 18 months but if that’s the case then it’s broken because we have just been introduced to the LG G-Slate dual-core TEGRA 2 tablet (1GHz Tegra 2 chipset, five-megapixel rear camera, two-megapixel front, 32GB storage, T-Mobile’s 21mbps HSPA+ network) and now we have this quad-core..well... awesomeness.

Great things are in the pipeline from everyone on the speed and power side of the game. That means that we can expect console-quality gaming in our portable devices within the next 18 months. Perhaps even, later this year.

What will this all do for tablet and superphone pricing? Well that remains to be seen, but with some of them topping the $500-700 range already they’ve rapidly surpassed netbook pricing and are hurtling toward full-on laptop prices. Would you rather a tablet or a full laptop for your portable gaming? This might also drive down prices on some products as well and could be good for your gaming-on-the-go. We have to wait and see. I already want a Logan Android device and I don’t even know what it is. Well done NVIDIA!