14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon seems to be making great progress with its 10-inch tablet powered by Nvidia's Kal-El system-on-a-chip (SoC) as reports suggest the company will start mass producing these devices as soon as the first quarter of 2012.
According to information uncovered by the DigiTimes publication, the company has already contracted Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) to handle the orders.
Judging by the details available up to this date about the 10-inch slate, known under the code name of Hollywood, Amazon's creation should be powered by an Nvidia Kal-El SoC.
For those of you requiring a quick refresh, Kal-El will be the successor of the current Tegra 2 chip and it features no less than four processing cores based on the ARM Cortex A9 architecture, which are clocked at 1.5GHz, as well as 12 graphics cores with support for 3D video.
According to Nvidia, this configuration will be able to provide up to five times the speed of the dual-core Tegra 2 SoC, making Kal-El one of the fastest ARM-based chips around.
In addition to its raw processing speed, the Tegra 3 integrated graphics will also support a series of advanced features such as anti-aliasing and a 2560x1600 video output.
All these will be achieved by using the same amount of power as Tegra 2, as Nvidia introduced a series of optimizations meant to keep power consumption in check.
Outside of the 10-inch Hollywood tablet, Amazon is also working on developing a 7-inch slate that is expected to start shipping from Taiwan in October of this year and is manufactured by Quanta Computer.
It remains to be seen how well these two solutions will fare against the competition, but Amazon seems to be determined to hit hard into Apple's iPad market share.