NVIDIA Tegra 3 Officially Unveiled, To Be World's First Quad-Core Smartphone Chip

NVIDIA held a coming-out party for the Tegra 3 mobile chipset today, setting it up to be the first quad-core ARM-based processor to appear in mobile devices.

The Tegra 3 will make its first appearance in the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet, which is set to launch in December. This chip will reportedly be in the HTC Edge smartphone, which is expected to debut next year.

NVIDIA marked the official debut of the Tegra 3 by showing off screen shots and performance details of the chipset, which is said to improve browsing, battery life and gaming. The chip has ARM A9-based architecture, as well as a 12-core GeForce GPU, providing three times the overall performance of the current Tegra 2, according to NVIDIA. 

Thanks to a technology called Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing (vSMP) the Tegra 3 will not drain your device’s battery as quickly as you may expect a four-core processor to. Due to a fifth “companion” processor that is used during times of low processing activity, vSMP is made possible, allowing the four primary processing cores to shut down. When more intense processing is required with gaming, multitasking or browsing, the chip’s other four cores kick in. NVIDIA promises that with vSMP the Tegra 3 will provide 61% lower power consumption than its predecessor. 

NVIDIA was sure to flaunt the Tegra 3’s gaming improvements, displaying heightened realism, making effects and stimulations much more realistic. The chip maker also confirmed plans to release around 40 games specifically designed to capitalize on the processing abilities by the end of this year.