MWC 2011: Nvidia Demos Quad-Core Tegra Processors

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When you’re willing to go so far as to name your new chip Kal-El (and for the non-comic book types out there, that’s the Kryptonian name of no less than Superman), you had better be prepared to back it up. But considering what Nvidia was bringing to the table with its new line of quad-core Tegra processors, I believe it’s safe to say there was no kryptonite at the Mobile World Congress show. And that old yellow sun was shining full force on sunny Barcelona.

Clearly not bringing a Nerf bat to a knife fight, Nvidia brought a pocket nuke instead, putting the quad-core Tegra through its paces with–get this–a display of 1440p video. And what’s more, that video was showing on a panel with a resolution of 2560 x 1600.

They also showed the Tegra handling games and web surfing without incident, and Nvidia, for its part, says that this is the first time ever that mobile devices will be able to pack quad-core processors, as well as enabling a GeForce GPU with a whopping 12 cores. Nvidia customers are apparently getting samples right now, with full production planned to kick off this August. Nvidia even reportedly showed off a company road map, featuring several other comic book-named projects to emerge over the course of the next three years, most notably: Wayne, Logan and Stark. While naturally we don’t know much about them yet, some information did slip out about Stark, and this little iron man will be packing fully 75 times the performance of Tegra 2, and will be starting up in 2014, giving you one more reason to hope that the Mayans were wrong about the whole 2012 thing.

And all of this sounds reasonably impressive until you take a deep breath, step back from the blindingly clear video, and realize that there are plenty of laptops–plenty of desktops, even!–out there running and doing a fine job that aren’t packing quad-core processors. We may be looking at something in the offing here, and that something may be more than we ever saw coming.