14 DAY TRIAL // During the IFA 2011 fair, which is open to visitors in Berlin, Germany, until September 7, Softpedia had the chance to talk with Nvidia about its present and future Tegra products as well as the company's plans regarding mobile gaming.
The Santa Clara based company started its presentation with a couple of info regarding the adoption rate of its system-on-a-chip (SoC) platform.
Some of these achievements were downright impressive, such as the 10 million chips shipped until the end of June or the 53 different phone SKUs available worldwide based on the Nvidia SoC, all of these confirming the popularity of Tegra 2 in the tablet and smartphone markets.
Its high popularity is also driven in part by the fact that Google chose Tegra 2 as the reference platform for Android 3.0 Honeycomb.
Speaking of Google's tablet-oriented operating system, Nvidia showed us quite an interesting graph during the presentation we attended, that basically said users can expect anything from a 10 to 40 percent improvement in graphics performance from the move from Android 3.0 to 3.1.
This speed increase depends on the application that is being run, but games like Samurai II and Dungen Defender seem to definitely benefit from the new version of the Android OS.
However, since performance is only a part of the equation, during the same presentation, Nvidia also wanted to talk to us about its efforts to support games development for the Tegra 2 platform.
According to the company's reps, 18 titles specially optimized for this platform are available right now from the Tegra Zone app (an application similar to the Android Market, but dedicated to Tegra 2 games), and this number is expected to grow to 50 by the end of the year.
Of course that achieving this target also depends on developers and publishers themselves, but Nvidia is offering full support to those interested in optimizing games for Tegra 2.
After presenting a few titles that benefit from these sort of enhancements, the presentation quickly became more interesting, as Igor Stanek, Nvidia's PR rep for the EMEA region, presented a slide mentioning the company's upcoming Kal-El chip.
Sadly, no new information was revealed, so all we know is that Kal-El will be based on an quad-core ARM design, paired with a new 12-core Nvidia GPU with support for 3D stereo. Nvidia promises this new configuration will deliver five times the speed of Tegra 2.
As the company previously promised, Kal-El is expected to arrive until the end of 2011, but Nvidia's reps refrained themselves from detailing when the first tablets using this new quad-core chip will arrive to market.
In the end of the presentation, Nvidia showed us a slide detailing its Tegra roadmap for the upcoming years, which includes the Wayne, Logan and Stark SoC solutions, the last one of these delivering up to 100 times the performance of Tegra 2.
