Quad-core Tegra chip for tablets announced by Nvidia

Nvidia have announced that a quad-core Tegra processing chip, including a 12-core GPU, will be released in August.

The project – codenamed Kal-El – represents what Nvidia believe is a big step forward in the evolution of the processor market.

Nvidia demonstrated the power of the chip at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress event this week, as well as unveiling a roadmap showing the planned release of a new generation of the Tegra chip every year up to 2014.

The demonstration showed off the chip’s high definition power, allowing operation at a resolution of 1440p, well above the current 1080p bench mark for what is considered to be high definition.

Jack Gold, principle analyst for J.Gold Associates identified the benefits of the new processor chip as PC devices become more demanding;

“In the tablets space were visual computing is so important, this is a big deal,” he said. “It’s not just the four cores that are important but the 12 graphic cores too. That’s an important thing because now you’re talking about real-time processing, 3D gaming and all the other stuff people want to do.”

Nvidia is joined on its quad-core mission by fellow manufacturers, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and ARM, quad-core chips are expected to be standard in new devices by Q1 of 2012.

There is as yet no information on which devices will be the first to rollout the new chip in August.

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