Imagining a quad-core Motorola Xoom

From CNET News.com: As chipmakers trip over each other to announce tablet-centric chips packing four processing engines, it's not hard to see where a product like the Motorola Xoom is headed.

Where? The same performance space a mainstream laptop occupies now. A graphic Nvidia released to CNET shows its next-generation Tegra processor exceeding Intel's Core 2 Duo processor (the chip used in many, if not most, laptops today) in performance.

And Nvidia is claiming benchmarks back up this (see second embedded video below). Benchmarks aside, it's easy to imagine a future Motorola Xoom tablet crunching image data at speeds similar or better than a Core 2 Duo-based laptop.

"Today at Mobile World Congress, we demonstrated [a quad-core Tegra] running in an Android tablet," Mike Rayfield, manager of Nvidia's mobile business, wrote in a blog today. "This wasn't your average amazing video. It was 1440p video content running on a 2560?1600 panel. That will enable mobile devices to output to the highest resolution monitors or tablets equipped with a 10.1-inch display with 300 DPI."

Can tablets handle these PC-like processing engines? Rayfield said today that customers (which currently include Motorola, Samsung, Toshiba, and LG) are ready for all the processing brawn that Nvidia can muster. "You might well ask, what on earth can be done with nearly 75x improvement in performance over Tegra 2 that Stark [future processor] will provide in 2014? Our customers and partners have already indicated that they're confident they can use everything we give them," he wrote.

View: Article @ Source Site