Nvidia Likely to Announce Quad-Core Mobile Processor at Mobile Congress

Nvidia Likely to Announce Quad-Core Mobile Processor at Mobile Congress

Will Nvidia announce the first quad-core mobile processor at the Mobile World Congress next month in Barcelona, Spain?

That has been the question circulating on message boards and social media sites this week as hundreds of Twitter posts and a significant increase in search traffic — Google Insights for Search reported a 78 percent increase in search queries about the topic since last month — indicate how excited the industry is about mobile computing and the possibility of a new and powerful multicore device.

Rumors of a soon-to-be-launched Nvidia Tegra 3 started to spread after Nvidia's Mike Rayfield, who manages the product line, told interviewers that the there would likely be a new Tegra processor each year.

The dual-core ARM-based Tegra 2, which Nvidia has dubbed “The World's First Mobile Super Chip,” made a huge splash when it was announced at CES 2010 and built on that momentum at CES 2011 thanks, in part, to the launch of the LG Optimus 2x dual-core CPU mobile device.

The Tegra 2 really filled a need that is analogous to the situation that drove the move to multi-core CPUs in desktop and laptop systems. Put simply, consumers demanded improved processing and power efficiency that single-core chips were not going to be able to provide.

Since, as mentioned above, the Tegra 2 was announced in 2010, if Rayfield was being forthright, there should be a Tegra 3 due out very soon. Nvidia did not officially announce a new Tegra device at CES 2011, thus the next opportunity to make a big splash will be at the Mobile World Congress February 14 to 17, or so the thinking goes.

Given the obvious interest and indications from Nvidia, odds are good that the company will, in fact, introduce a new multicore solution aimed at mobile devices, including tablets.

Armando Roggio