NVIDIA announces Tegra 3

Tegra 2 has been the most famous platform in the ARM based smartphones and tablets till date with almost all companies basing their slates on this chip. Now the American chip giant officially announces their next offering – Tegra 3, reports AndroidCommunity. Part of the ongoing Kal-EI project, this is a powerful quad-core chip capable of executing much faster instructions than today’s dual-core Tegra 2. 

The Kal-EI project concept was started in September last year, and the consequent developments have been in discussions around the net since then. 

Of course the quad-core chip will be much faster than today’s dual-core ones, but the true potential of Tegra 3 could be the 5^th chip that takes over the seat when other cores are not needed, making your device all the more energy efficient. It also has twelve GPU cores (graphics) to accompany the five processing cores. The vSMP or Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing architecture makes this power usage switching possible. When a user only needs a low power, the 5^th single core will come into play. It will do your daily tasks like viewing photos, reading mails or browsing the web easily, while conserving power and battery by shutting down the other four. The moment you need that extra power, let’s say while you are playing that demanding video game – the four cores take over to provide that extra bit of nitro to run these smoothly. If this reminds you of the Optimus technology NVIDIA made so popular in notebooks – you are not the only one! Androidcommunity finds out that the Tegra 3 could be up to three times a better performer than existing chips.

We already know that the Eee Pad Transformer Prime will come carrying the Tegra 3 but with time expect to see many more devices with this platform. The Transformer Prime has just been released.

With this update, finally the portable devices should be able to play demanding games along with efficient multi-tasking capabilities. And doing all these without losing much battery life could be music to a traveller’s ears.

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