What Quad-Core Means for Tablets
Tablet computers grow more popular by the day. New quad-core models promise to accelerate that trend, offering enhanced video processing and longer battery life — features that will make the devices more enticing to teachers, students and staff.
NVIDIA is at the heart of this development in the tablet market. The California manufacturer's Tegra 3 quad-core processor offers improved performance and uses 61 percent less power than a dual-core tablet doing the same tasks.
The Tegra 3 mobile chip actually includes five ARM Cortex-A9 CPU cores: four 1.6-gigahertz main cores and one 500-megahertz companion core. The companion or battery-saving core handles low-power tasks, such as Facebook updates or music streaming. Once the workload exceeds a certain power threshold, the Tegra 3 switches to the high-performance cores and disables the companion core, says Nick Stam, NVIDIA's director of technical marketing. "The processor is very intelligent, and it dynamically monitors the workload," he says.
So what does all that extra horsepower mean? A faster tablet that runs up to 12 hours between charges and supports high-quality 1080p video. The Tegra 3 powers quad-cores from Acer, Asus, Lenovo and Toshiba.
Great Minds Think Alike
Other manufacturers are thinking along similar lines. Samsung, which offers the Galaxy Tab dual-core tablet, points to the speed and efficiency of multicore processors.
"Implementing multicore processors into the Galaxy Tab product line empowers us not only to achieve rapid computing speeds, but also to maximize battery life," says Travis Merrill, Samsung America's director of marketing for the Galaxy Tab.
Still, industry analysts caution that significant performance gains must await applications designed to take advantage of quad-core chips, though users may see an immediate improvement in games or other complex computing applications.
Richard Shim, a senior analyst for NPD Display Search, sees quad-core processors as a first step toward real performance improvements across the board. Quad-core tablets promise to let users multitask more easily, which will offer an enhanced experience, Shim predicts.
