In terms of presence in the chip market, this has been the year of Nvidia so far as the dual core Tegra 2 system on a chip (SOC) appeared on most of the major tablets that hit the market in 2011. That’s not all, the quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 SoC will begin arriving in a few months this year itself.
Tegra 3 Processor will have four cores, a graphics processing unit (GPU) with 12 cores, and display Resolution up to 2560 x 1200 pixels — all this combinly will provide around five times better performance compared than the 1 GHz dual-core Tegra 2 SoC.
In a statement to a website, Nvidia says, “Project Kal-El-powered tablets are coming this Fall, and phones around the CES (Consumer Electronic Show) 2012 timeframe”.
Just on the basis of this statement, users cannot jump to conclusion they will get their quad core phones in the first month of 2012, but by summer at least they can expect to see something tangible in the market.
Tegra 3 is expected to be a huge step forward from Tegra 2, but users are still waiting for the actual device.
The only problem is that the software apps will need to be rewritten to unlock the potential of quad core processors. But once it has been done, multitasking or even running heavy apps such as graphics heavy games which use a lot of data would become easier.