Nvidia (NVDA) could be the life of the processor party at this month’s Mobile World Congress event; the company has wowed the press with a splashy invitation to see “quad-core firsts” at the Barcelona show that starts Feb. 27.
The invite shows a man holding a phone that looks very much like an HTC model, leading to speculation that an HTC Android phone with an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core chipset is in the works. Although HTC has a longstanding relationship with Qualcomm (QCOM), which owns a minority stake in the Taiwanese handset maker, the company says it has not agreed to use Qualcomm’s chipsets exclusively. (Qualcomm is working on its own quad-core processor, expected later this year.)
Currently, Nvidia’s Tegra 3 processor powers the Asus Transformer Prime tablet, the first quad-core device to hit the market. Semiconductor analyst Linley Gwennap has studied performance reviews of the Asus tablet, and says that many people are saying performance is not much better than it is with a tablet using a dual-core processor. The reason, says Gwennap, is that the third and fourth cores are “not kicking in” because the apps are not optimized for a quad-core processor. “Over the course of this year we will start to see more software optimized for quad core,” said Gwennap, who added that products introduced at MWC may not ship until later in the year, and that by that time Web browsers and other key mobile apps may be ready for quad-core processors.
Nvidia’s CEO believes quad-core chipsets and mobile apps are in a chicken-and-egg situation – one has to come first to get the other started. Now that quad-core processors for mobile devices are here, Nvidia is working closely with high-end game developers to try to help them take advantage of the faster chips. Nvidia says quad-core processors also improve multi-tasking for smartphones, giving users the ability to switch quickly between open apps. In fact, Nvidia’s director of technical marketing told PCWorld that smartphones with quad-core processors can function as PCs, and will enable users to see their phones as their primary computing devices.
Other device makers are also expected to unveil quad-core offerings at MWC. Fujitsu has already demonstrated a Tegra 3 smartphone at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show, and LG is also expected to introduce a device at MWC. Asus has said it will unveil a new PadFone in Barcelona. The device is expected to include a dock that brings the smartphone’s display to a larger screen, a promising feature for a phone dubbed capable of functioning as a computer. But at last month’s CES event, prototypes of the PadFone were reportedly using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipsets, not Tegra 3 chipsets.
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