While most of us in the U.S. were relaxing over the holiday weekend, tech titans were busy talking up the next generation of gadgets at the Computex trade show in Taiwan.
One of the coolest demos so far comes from the crew at Nvidia -- the guys who make the Tegra 2 chips that power most of the high-profile Android devices on the market today.
While Tegra 2 is a dual-core processor, Nvidia's next-gen chip -- codenamed Kal El -- ups the ante with four separate cores for your mobile computing pleasure. That's right, my friends: the quad-core smartphone is actually almost here. Man, this stuff evolves fast.
Here's a video Nvidia released showing the quad-core technology in action. The clip illustrates what the four-core setup can do for the mobile experience, using a resource-intensive game as an example.
So what about Android battery life? Believe it or not, Nvidia says its quad-core chip is actually more efficient than the Tegra 2 model out there today. If you were to use all four cores nonstop, you'd get about four to six hours of device life, Nvidia says. In reality, of course, most applications won't light up all four cores continuously.
Nvidia says its first quad-core phones and tablets will be available this September. The company will have some competition, too: Both Qualcomm and Texas Instruments are working on quad-core offerings of their own as well.
In other words, we've got an exciting fall ahead of us -- and that's not even considering the Android Ice Cream Sandwichrelease also set for the fourth quarter. Fasten your seatbelts, Android fans: These next seven months promise to be anything but dull.
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