NVIDIA Demos Quad-Core Tegra at Mobile World Congress

While Qualcomm is preparing to release its quad-core Snapdragon sometimes early next year, GPU rival NVIDIA is already here with its next generation quad-core Tegra. On Tuesday, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, NVIDIA demonstrated the quad-core Tegra, labeled project Kal-El, running in an Android (News - Alert) tablet. According to NVIDIA, Kal-El delivers five times the performance of the two-core Tegra 2. It is rated at 11,352 on the Coremark 1.0 benchmark.

 The demonstration showed it browsing the Web, running games and streaming amazing video. This wasn’t your average amazing video, stated NVIDIA (News - Alert). “It was 1440p video content running on a 2560×1600 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,” said Michael Rayfield in a company blog post.

The maker claimed that this is the first quad-core processor based mobile device, and that it enables a new 12 core GeForce GPU. The blogger said that NVIDIA customers are getting samples now, and they are planning production in August.

While demonstrating project Kal-El to the attendees of Mobile World Congress, the supplier also presented a glimpse of the company roadmap. It includes projects codenamed Wayne, Logan, and Stark, coming out in a steady one-year cadence over the next three years, according to Rayfield.

The blogger also provided some teasers for the Stark. It offers 75 times improvement in performance over Tegra 2 and will be coming in 2014.

Regarding Qualcomm (News - Alert), the latest members of Snapdragon family include the single-core MSM8930, the dual-core MSM8960 and the quad-core APQ8064 mobile processors. Although, sampling for MSM8930 is planned for the second quarter, samples for dual-core MSM8960 and quad-core APQ8064 is slated for early 2012.