Android goes quad-core by year-end: NVIDIA CEO

Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO and president has announced that Android tablets with a quad-core NVIDIA processor would be rolled out by Christmas creating a definite stir amongst technology enthusiasts.

NVIDIA is currently the most popular chipset maker for smartphones and tablets in the world. It makes processors for many companies including Motorola, Blackberry and Samsung. Even the future Sony tablets come with a NVIDIA processor.
 
Cnet quoted Huang expressing his excitement about the upcoming processor – “We're trying to get there as fast as possible. Some of it is related to getting the industrial design as wonderful as possible, and some of it's related to tuning and performance. But it's going to be pretty great”.

Huang further added that around 70 percent of Android devices already run on NVIDIA processors. Most interestingly, he also revealed that the upcoming Windows 8 OS for tablets would also run on NVIDIA processors.

NVIDIA’s TEGRA 3 or Kal-El processor is the fastest processor till date. It would come with a 12-core GPU and a quad-core CPU. It is expected to be five times as powerful as the current TEGRA 2 dual-core processor.

The Arrival of quad-core processors would also make the competition between Google and Apple even more intense. Apple devices currently come with an A5 chip although the future devices are expected to run on a quad-core A6 processor. With the arrival of quad-core Androids before the end of this year, it would be interesting to see how Apple responds to this move.    

Although quad-core tablets such as the Asus Transformer 3 are expected to arrive by the end of the year, currently there is no information available on the release of quad-core smartphones.