14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA's Tegra 2 chipset is currently the most wanted dual-core solution for high-end devices out there, with a nice series of smartphones or tablets running under Android already announced or rumored to be on their way to the market with this chip inside.
The chip includes two ARM Cortex A9 CPU cores, along with purpose-built cores aimed at handling specific tasks, and to increase the performance levels the device can deliver.
“NVIDIA Tegra is the world’s most advanced mobile processor built from the ground up as a heterogeneous multi-core SoC (System-On-a-Chip) architecture with two ARM Cortex A9 CPU cores and several other purpose-built cores to handle specialized tasks such as audio, video, and graphics,” the company notes.
According to Nvidia, this is the future in mobile. With more and more demanding applications being released into the wild, handsets would transit to a multi-core architecture to address any performance issues that might appear.
“In order to further increase the performance, and extend battery life, mobile devices will transition to multi-core CPUs,” the company notes in a white paper called “The Benefits of Multiple CPU Cores in Mobile Devices.”
Moreover, the company stresses on the advantages handsets can enjoy from this architecture: “but mobile devices like smartphones and tablets benefit even more from multi-core architectures because the battery life benefits are so substantial.”
If today we're looking only at single core solutions, with the next year to be dominated by dual-core, other architectures would rule in the future, Nvidia suggests.
“Dual-core processors will be the standard in 2011, and quad-core is coming in the near future,” is what the leading graphics cards maker stated.
In all fairness, Nvidia does not offer specific info on what it means by “the near future,” but we should not hold our breath waiting for those quad-core smartphones to land in our hands, that's for sure.
Hopefully, if not 2012, than the next year would offer us the possibility to see these device on shelves. However, it remains to be seen whether mobile OSes would be capable of taking advantage of their capabilities, and when mobile application to scale on large number of cores would emerge.