Recently Nvidia have unveiled their awaited Tegra 3 chip, codenamed after the fictional kryptonian superhero Kal-El, the first quad-core mobile processor currently around.
The Tegra 3 was specially designed for tablets as well as super phones, and apparently bests the performance of the Tegra 2 chip by a factor of five, as for the graphics, it’s bested by a factor of three, thanks to a 12-core Nvidia GeForce GPU with stereo 3D support.
While it still is a quad-core chip, it’s portability is guaranteed by a power consumption reduced by 61%, which will obviously save precious battery time.
Another feature integrated with the new Tegra 3 is a fifth core, nicknamed the “companion core”, it is designed to take over for less-intensive tasks, tasks such as listening to music or updating background data. The technology used by Nvidia for this new “companion core” is called Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing, or vSMP.
Here is a video by Nvidia providing a side by side comparisons of the Tegra 3 chip and the competition:
[youtube]9gl-UGVhmAA[/youtube]The first product that will come out with the Tegra 3 is the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, and if the Tegra 3 proves to be as good as Nvidia says, we can expect a boost in performance from our future mobile devices.
