Skip to main content

NVIDIA unveils the world’s first quad-core mobile processor

If you just recently bought a brand new smartphone with the most powerful processing speeds known to man, bad news, it just became obsolete. Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, NVIDIA once again kicked sand in the face of all other mobile processor manufacturers by unveiling the simply ridiculously powerful quad-core CPU, which is being called “Project Kal-El”. Project Kal-El, the newest member of the Tegra family, uses a new 12 core GeForce GPU, and it rusn 1440p video on an extreme HD display of 2560×1600.

Now, it isn’t all that uncommon for a manufacturer to come out and tell people its future plans. It is is good for the stock and the confidence in the company to let people know what they are planning, and besides, announcing projects with vague release dates is easy. But NVIDIA didn’t just announce the new quad-core processor–which is again, the first of its kind in the world–it actually showed off working models of the new chip, which they demoed on a tablet.

If you aren’t heavily into the tech of smartphones, it might not sound like all that impressive of a leap. But to put this into perspective, we are just now beginning to see the first dual-core mobile chips hit the market, and now NVIDIA’s newest Tegra chip is due to hit the manufacturer in August. Tablets will be the first device to feature the new chip, and smartphones will have them by Christmas of this year. That is not just a technological improvement, it is a technological leap.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

NVIDIA claims that the newest chip in the Tegra family will show a 5x improvement over the current Tegra 2 chip, and that is just the beginning. In 2012, “Project Wayne” will debut with 10x improvement over the Tegra 2 chip. 2013 will see the release of “Project Logan”, and 2014 will see the debut of “Project Stark”, which is promised to show a staggering 75x improvement.

To put this simply, smartphones may soon become totally obsolete as the second, third, and even fourth generation of superphones are already on the horizon.

Ryan Fleming
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Ryan Fleming is the Gaming and Cinema Editor for Digital Trends. He joined the DT staff in 2009 after spending time covering…
The first HMD Android phones are here, and they’re super cheap
Rear shell of HMD Vibe smartphone.

Finnish company Human Mobile Devices is renewing its journey under the HMD branding, shedding aside the Nokia naming it used to use for all of its smartphones. The first handsets to bear the HMD branding are the HMD Pulse, HMD Pulse+, HMD Pulse Pro, and the HMD Vibe. All phones share similar aesthetics, with a few splashy colors thrown in for certain trims, and target the budget segment.

The HMD Vibe, for example, serves a 6.56-inch display with an HD+ resolution and a 90Hz refresh rate. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 680 silicon runs the show, alongside 4GB of RAM and 128GB storage. Notably, there’s a microSD card slot that supports storage expansion up to 512GB.

Read more
How to view Instagram without an account
An iPhone 15 Pro Max showing Instagram via a web browser.

Instagram is one of the largest social media platforms on the planet. Whether you want to share a family photo, what you had for lunch at your favorite cafe, or a silly video of your cat, Instagram is the place to do it.

Read more
Something odd is happening with Samsung’s two new budget phones
A person holding the Samsung Galaxy A35 and Galaxy A55.

The Samsung Galaxy A35 (left) and Galaxy A55 Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

I’ve been using the Samsung Galaxy A55 for almost two weeks and have now swapped my SIM card over to the Samsung Galaxy A35. These are the latest entries in Samsung's budget-minded Galaxy-A series. In all honestly, I can barely tell the difference between them.

Read more