Android smartphone hardware revisions happen quickly, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that newer phones already outperform the Ouya microconsole in benchmark tests.

Last week, developer James Coote (designer of Ouya game Executive Star) worked with graphics firm Futuremark to determine the raw capabilities of the Ouya Android console. He posted the results to YouTube, and Futuremark listed the device on its ranked list of mobile hardware.

Ouya stormed the gaming scene with a massively successful Kickstarter in 2012 that raised nearly $8.6 million. With that kind of support, the device is expected to bring even further disruption to the console market and chip away at Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. Its graphical prowess should play a key role in how gamers view it in comparison to the competition.

The 3DMark benchmark measures a device’s hardware and spits out a cumulative number that represents its performance as a whole. Ouya scored a 4,077 — that was enough to land it at 73 on Futuremark’s list of most-powerful Android devices. That puts it ahead of the popular Nexus 7 tablet from Google, which scored a 3,551, but the console couldn’t outperform older tablets like Asus’s Transformer Pad Infinity, which scored a 4,246.

The results speak to Ouya’s aging chipset, which includes an Nvidia Tegra 3 graphics processor, a 1.7 GHz quad-core ARM CPU, and 1GB of memory. Both the Nexus 7 and Asus Transformer Infinity also run the Tegra 3.

But Ouya’s age really shows when compared to more recent handsets.

LG’s Nexus 4 phone, for example, scored more than double the Ouya with a 10,201 on the 3DMark tests. HTC’s One and Samsung’s Galaxy S IV are both even higher than that.

It’s important to keep in mind that benchmarks like 3DMark only measure raw capabilities. It doesn’t take into account real-world factors that can greatly affect a device’s performance in more realistic use cases. Nvidia is especially effective at working with developers to get the most of its hardware.

Also worth noting is that the $99 Ouya is a fraction of the cost of a Galaxy S IV or HTC One.

Finally, it’s not like the microconsole can’t play 3D-intensive games. Most developers build their releases around the most popular hardware — that’s the Nexus 7 and Samsung’s Galaxy S III, which scored a 5,076 on the benchmark. The Ouya can handle just about anything that phone can, so it shouldn’t hurt for software.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mounting its biggest challenge to market leader Qualcomm, Nvidia is introducing its first mobile processor with integrated wireless data technology. The company says the result will be smartphones with killer processing power and 3D graphics.

The new Tegra 4i has the highest performance of any single-chip smartphone processor, according to Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia. The chip represents the maker’s big chance to grab market share in smartphones as it shifts from its mainstay business of developing graphics chips for personal computers to creating chips for mobile devices.

Nvidia is announcing the chip ahead of the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, where the Tegra 4i will be on display. It will also have sample smartphone designs to make it easier for customers to adopt it. As you can see from the above picture, the Tegra 4i is smaller than the Tegra 4 chip for tablets and superphones.

But the competition is tough. Qualcomm is introducing its 600 and 800 series Snapdragon processors in the coming months, and it has lots of design wins. Those processors have high-end 3D graphics and high-speed LTE data networking that can deliver 150-megabits-a-second data access (once such networks emerge).

Still, Nvidia says its chip is half the size of its competitor’s, which means it will likely be cheaper and consume less power, resulting in longer battery life. Nvidia claims that the Tegra 4i can generate performance per square millimeter that is 2.5 times better than the Snapdragon 800 series chip. The 4i’s raw performance is also faster, and it delivers blazing fast Web browsing, Nvidia said.

Nvidia’s chip is sampling now, and a few phones could feature it later this year. But more smartphones with the chip should debut in the spring of 2014. Qualcomm, by contrast, said devices with its 800 series chip could appear mid-year.

“The Nvidia Tegra 4i looks competitive on a performance-per-mm2 basis, but until we see third-party tests between Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and Nvidia’s Tegra 4i, no one knows for certain,” said Patrick Moorhead, president of analyst firm Moor Insights & Strategy. “Qualcomm did provide enough performance details at CES where one could derive a reasonable competitive estimate. If the Tegra 4i performance estimates do stand, then Nvidia could be very competitive, particularly in China and southeast Asia, where performance at a cost level means a lot.”

Moorhead added, “Nvidia’s biggest differentiator with the 4i is its integrated and software-upgradable LTE modem combined with its graphics brand.  This could be the first significant threat to Qualcomm in that it’s the first time a high performance system-on-a-chip with integrated LTE is available from someone other than Qualcomm.”

The Tegra 4i, previously code-named Project Grey, has 60 custom graphics cores for 3D graphics and four heavy-duty microprocessor cores to handle computing tasks. It also has a version of Nvidia’s i500 LTE modem, optimized for integration with the processor. The modem can deliver up to 150 megabits per second LTE data service.

The processor uses ARM’s newest and most power-efficient core, the 2.3-gigahertz R4 Cortex-A9 central processing unit. Nvidia also added a fifth lightweight core to handle small tasks while saving on battery life.

Nvidia says the design enables an “extremely power-efficient, compact, high-performance mobile processor that enables smartphone performance and capability previously available only in expensive superphones.”

Phil Carmack, senior vice president of the mobile business at Nvidia, said, “Nvidia is delivering for the first time a single, integrated processor that powers all the major functions of a smartphone. Tegra 4i phones will provide amazing computing power, world-class phone capabilities, and exceptionally long battery life.”

ARM and Nvidia jointly designed the new CPU, basing it on the ARM Cortex-9 processor. Tom Cronk, executive vice president at ARM, said the project focused on driving performance, efficiency, and improvements in streaming and responsiveness.

The Tegra 4i has lesser graphics capabilities than the 72-graphics-core Tegra 4 introduced in January for tablet computers and Nvidia’s Project Shield mobile gaming device. But it’s still a powerhouse, with more than five times the number of graphics cores as last year’s Tegra 3 processor.

Nvidia says the graphics processing can deliver “high-quality, console-quality gaming experiences and full 1080p high-definition displays.”

The LTE modem is an optimized version of Nvidia’s i500 software-defined radio chip, with LTE and network-upgrade technology. The 4i mobile processor’s camera includes the Computational Photography Architecture first seen in the Tegra 4. The advanced features include high-dynamic range, where the camera can take a good picture even it contains bright and shadowy parts.

The camera also has tap-to-track functions and panoramic photos with high-dynamic range.

To spur adoption, Nvidia introduced its Phoenix reference smartphone platform — a design that phone makers can use as a model for their own smartphones. The platform’s purpose is to help customers get to the market quicker.

Wikipad, the company developing an identically named tablet that will ship with an attachable gamepad for console-style gaming, has revealed the specifications of the device in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.

The Wikipad (tablet, not company) will have a 10.1-inch IPS display with 16:10 1,280 x 800 resolution. The actual tablet will weigh 560 grams and be just 8.6mm thick, making it one of the thinnest and lightest 10″ tablets ever, only slightly thicker than the iPad 2 and nearly 40 grams lighter. When the Wikipad was first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, it was a 7″ tablet that was more similar in design to the Amazon Kindle Fire.

The final design model, which the company revealed to us at a design office in Thousand Oaks, Calif., will feature the NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30 1.4GHz quad-core processor with 1GB of DDR2 RAM. For comparison, the recently released Nexus 7 uses the T30L, which is a 1.2GHz quad-core processor with a 416MHz GPU (compared to 520MHz on the T30) and slower DDR2 RAM (667MHz vs. 1066MHz), and the ASUS Transformer Prime Infinity 700 and upcoming Ouya will use the more powerful T33, which clocks at 1.6GHz and has bandwidth for faster 1600MHz DDR3 RAM.

The Wikipad will also ship with at least 16GB of internal storage, though the amount of local storage hasn’t been finalized as of yet. However, according to Fraser Townley, President of Sales at Wikipad, “we will not go down, we will only go up.” 16GB is the standard amount of storage for tablets today.

The battery is 23.46Wh, capable of six hours of continuous gaming and eight hours of video playback.

Instead of tapered edges, the Wikipad will have flat sides similar to the iPhone 4/4S. The rear panel will also have an elevated plastic lip designed for a better grip in any holding arrangement. This also enables the speakers on the back of the tablet to bounce off of any flat surface and deliver strong acoustics.

Every Wikipad will ship with Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and the controller add-on. The controller, which connects to the Wikipad from the bottom with a proprietary connector, is designed similar to the Xbox 360 controller, though according to the company there is little relation to Microsoft’s nearly seven-year-old design. The controller features two sets of triggers, bumpers, and analog sticks, as well as four face buttons, start, and select. The controller is also designed to cover the speakers and flow sound through acoustic tubes out the front grill for better audio performance. The controller also has a port to connect it to a power source on the back.

Wikipad will also feature a built-in 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 2 megapixel front-facing camera.

Finally, the Wikipad will not ship the first line of the tablet with a 3D display, which the company originally showed off at CES. Future models may ship with a 3D display. The Wikipad doesn’t have a definite release date yet, but according to Wikipad President James Bower, it will release later this year, and the company will reveal much more regarding the tablet in the very near future.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Nvidia’s business will grow thanks to growing acceptance of Tegra 3, a mobile processor that combines Nvidia’s high-end graphics with five computing brains. A leader in PC graphics, Nvidia has reinvented itself in the last five years to become a major player in mobile graphics chips. It competes with huge rivals such as Intel and Qualcomm, and it is holding its own on that front, Huang said.

“It stands to reason that because mobile and cloud computing are new paradigms, new computing paradigms would have to be invented,” Huang said. “There’s a new growth market in mobile.”

So far, Nvidia’s partners have shipped two phones with Tegra 3, including the HTC 1x and the Fujitsu Aero. This year, Nvidia expects that 30 Tegra designs will hit the market this year, compared to 15 last year, said Mike Rayfield (pictured), general manager of the Tegra business. In 2011, the Tegra 2 designs were used in 34 tablets and 67 smartphones. And that has generated a $400 million revenue business to date for Nvidia.

The Tegra 3 chip, which is five times more powerful in computing and three times more powerful in graphics than the

Nvidia has also just received AT&T’s certification for Nvidia’s LTE data modem chip. That means it could be used in phones that access AT&T’s LTE high-speed data network. That could help the company get off the ground in the U.S. market. The modem chips are built by Icera, a startup that Nvidia recently acquired.

Rayfield said that Tegra will be getting into sub-$300 tablets and smartphones. And the company is making progress in China. Rayfield said that five Tegra designs debuted in China last year, and 18 more will debut in China this year. Two carriers embraced Tegra phones in a big way last year, but dozens are expected to do so this year, Rayfield said.

Last week, Nvidia started talking about Kai, a mobile platform that could be the heart of an Android tablets that cost less than $199. And Nvidia has high hopes for Windows RT, the ARM-based software platform that Microsoft will release for tablet computers later this year. Those tablets are expected to give Apple a run for its money, finally.

“Mobility is going to be the most significant part of this new market,” Huang said. “These aren’t PCs. They don’t connect to printers. People don’t worry about that. It’s a different device from a PC.”

Nvidia had a tough time in the past quarter because it couldn’t get enough high-end 28-nanometer wafers from its contract chip manufacturers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The demand for chips was there, but Nvidia couldn’t get enough chips out to meet that demand, Huang said.

Nvidia is pushing mobile apps that make use of its chips. The Tegra Zone on Android devices has been downloaded more than 3 million times. Rayfield also showed a cool-looking game dubbed Dark Meadow: The Pact working on a Tegra 3 device. It had high-end 3D graphics and realistic lighting and shadows.

By next year, Nvidia expects to launch two new chips: one code-named Wayne for the high end and another code-named Grey for the low end.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

LG was the first company to show off a dual-core smartphone last year, and it has once again beaten the rest of the pack with tonight’s announcement of the Optimus 4X HD, the world’s first quad-core phone.

The news heralds next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a major event for the mobile industry where LG will be showing off the Optimus 4X. But you can bet it won’t be the only company hawking quad-core smartphones.

2012 is expected to be the year of quad-core smartphones, which will deliver the obvious benefit of more computing power, but also more efficiency when it comes to power. The additional cores will certainly help make smartphones more capable gaming machines, but they’ll also help when it comes to multitasking, as well as when performing heavy-duty tasks like 1080p video recording and powering LTE chipsets.

The Optimus 4X HD is powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 3 processor running at 1.5 gigahertz. We’ve been waiting a while for Tegra 3 phones to hit the market after it was announced in November. Tablets featuring the chip were glimpsed at the Consumer Electronics Show last month, including the Asus Transformer Prime and HTC Quattro. Like all Tegra 3 devices, the Optimus 4X will be able to take advantage of Nvidia’s “4-plus-1″ technology, which offers a low-voltage core for the phone to use when it needs to save power.

It’ll ship with Android 4.0 (we’re hoping this is the standard for all quad-core Android devices), and will sport a 4.7-inch display with a 1280 by 720 (720p HD) display. The Optimus 4X will sport 1 gigabyte of RAM (again, we hope this becomes the standard) and 16 gigabytes of storage.

The phone is expected to launch in Europe in the second quarter, but beyond that we don’t have many details about it. Expect more information to come next week as LG shows off the 4X at Mobile World Congress, and check back here for VentureBeat’s live coverage of the event.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Chip-maker Nvidia showed that a tablet computer with its new Tegra 3 processor for mobile devices can run Windows 8.

Huang made the announcement at the company’s press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The Tegra 3 uses the ARM architecture rather than the Intel-dominated x86 architecture, so it is interesting that the ARM-based Tegra 3 can now run Windows, which has been Intel-based for many years.

Microsoft announced last year that it would add ARM-based processors to the chips that can run Windows 8. Now the day is near when ARM-based vendors such as Nvidia will crack the hold that Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have had on PC chips.

“I can’t wait to ship it,” Huang said. “This is going to be a fantastic tablet year, with (Google’s) Ice Cream Sandwich and Windows 8.”

Nvidia, which is the largest stand-alone maker of PC graphics chips, spent most of its press conference showing how well rich applications can run on Nvidia-based tablets with Tegra 3 chips. Huang showed off the graphics features of Tegra 3, playing cool 3D games such as Wipeout HD and Shadowgun (a first-person shooter game) on an Nvidia-based tablet. Huang used one of the best pro gamers on the planet, Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendell to demonstrate the game on an Asustek Transformer Prime tablet-and-PC hybrid.

Huang sang the praises of Ice Cream Sandwich version of the Google Android operating system, which he said unites the fragmented pieces of Android. The Eee Pad Transformer Prime is available for sales today, running Ice Cream Sandwich.

Jerry Shen, chief executive of Asustek, said that his company had just announced a 7-inch Tegra 3-based tablet for $249. That’s a very low price for a tablet computer using a quad-core Tegra 3 chip. It has all-day battery life and can run cool games.

Huang also announced a surprise feature of Tegra 3 called DirectTouch. It means that Tegra’s fifth “ninja” processor can handle the processing of touchscreen inputs that are normally handled by microcontrollers. Huang said that the ninja processor is much faster than microcontrollers, and can triple the performance of touchscreen processing.

Huang closed with a note that the Tegra 3 will appear in “some of the world’s fastest cars,” including a Lamborhini model, in addition to cars being made by Audi. Audi evidently has more announcements about car electronics systems coming up.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Being first has its advantages.

Taiwanese computer maker Acer was the first major company to hold a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show Sunday, where it briefly showed off a powerful new Iconia Tab slate with a quad-core processor and high-resolution 1080p display.

Acer VP of mobile computing Campbell Kan teased the 10.1-inch Android tablet to the CES crowd, saying simply, “Isn’t it cool?”

The new Iconia Tab will be powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 3 system-on-a-chip, but other than that we don’t have any other details about the device.

While the specs initially sound interesting, I can’t help but see this as the CES equivalent of an obnoxious Internet commenter shouting “First!” in a comment thread. We expect many quad-core tablets to be unveiled at CES 2012 (Asus has already released its quad-core Transformer Prime), and many of them will likely be more tempting than Acer’s, especially since the company has failed to impress with any of its Android tablets so far.

Via Engadget

If you couldn’t tell by the avalanche of product news hitting VentureBeat over the past few weeks, the next Consumer Electronics Show is almost upon us. The annual trade show, which has been held in Las Vegas for more than a decade, is where many of the world’s biggest electronics companies debut their new products, announce major news, and desperately try to remind us that they exist.

A flood of news is par for the course at CES (VentureBeat will be covering the event extensively, as we’re sending more writers than ever before), but every year a few major themes emerge that will resonate for the rest of the year. While the value of CES has arguably declined over the past decade — with companies like Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft announcing plenty of products at their own press events throughout the year — the show still provides us an interesting glimpse of what lies ahead.

This year’s trade show is poised to be one of the biggest in years, as the Consumer Electronics Association believes it will draw 149,000 attendees to more than 2,700 exhibitors occupying more than 1.8 million square feet of exhibit space.

Granted, some of the most significant consumer electronics and computing products won’t have a presence at the show at all. Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system, due later in 2012, will likely be the consumer tech product that affects more people than any other. And Apple’s iPad 3 (and rumored iTV) are among the most-anticipated and most-hyped upcoming products. None of these will have any presence at CES 2012. But that still leaves a huge electronics industry full of products, technologies and trends.

Here are our predictions for the CES trends that will make a profound impact on the technology world, both for businesses and consumers, in 2012.

4G networks, round 2

Verizon Wireless’s LTE 4G network was all the rage at last year’s CES, having launched just a month prior, and it marked the arrival of cellular networks that could finally achieve speeds comparable to home broadband connections. While Verizon has had its run of the LTE field for the past year, this year it’ll finally have some competition from AT&T and Sprint.

At CES, AT&T will be showing off its first run of LTE 4G phones, following the launch of its network  back in September. Leading the pack for AT&T will be the Nokia Ace, AKA the Lumia 900, which we think could turn the tide for Windows Phone. AT&T certainly has a lot of catching up to do, and we suspect that the carrier will be making some major announcements regarding aggressive expansion of its network.

Sprint, meanwhile, has said that it will have a major roll out of its LTE network in the middle of 2012, which will be followed by the arrival of LTE phones later in the year. The company was the first to launch a 4G network years ago, but it ran the slower WiMax standard. Now that LTE has proven to be faster and easier to deploy, Sprint has to jump ship from WiMax. We expect Sprint to divulge many more details about its LTE plans at CES.

That leaves T-Mobile, which for the past year has been embroiled in a potential takeover by AT&T. Now that that’s not happening, the carrier will likely move forward with plans to expand its HSPA+ 4G network, which at this point has already reached 42 megabit speeds in nearly 100 cities.

Ultrabooks, the new face of laptops

Last summer’s MacBook Air update proved that super thin ultraportables could finally go toe-to-toe with bulkier laptops. And not surprisingly, PC makers have since tried to replicate the Air’s success with ultrabooks, a term for the ultraportable machines coined by Intel. We’ve already seen some ultrabooks announced by Asus, Acer, HP and Toshiba, but at CES there will be between 30 and 50 new models announced.

Eventually, all laptops will resemble what we’re calling ultrabooks. The laptop industry has long aspired to fit as much power as possible in a tiny package. Ultrabooks are the realization of that dream. It used to be that ultraportable laptops came at a premium, then low-cost (but underpowered) netbooks eventually proved machines didn’t need to be expensive to be very portable. With ultrabooks, you get extreme portability and a decent amount of power at a price not much more expensive than mainstream laptops. Intel researchers say Ultrabooks enable “flow,” or the idea of being able to work in an uniterrupted manner.

Ultrabooks are also the best way for computer manufacturers to combat the rise of tablets. While slates like the Kindle Fire are getting increasingly cheaper, it’s still not as easy to be productive on a tablet (yes, even the iPad), as you can on a full-fledged laptop. At only a few pounds heavier than 10-inch tablets, ultrabooks could be seen as a companion to cheap tablets, and for some consumers they may even erase the need for a tablet altogether.

Mobile chipsets achieve desktop power

Silently powering the smartphone and tablet revolution are mobile chipsets that are powerful, while still being heavily optimized to not eat up too much battery life. Last year saw the rise of dual-core chipsets, including Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor, Nvidia’s Tegra 2, and Apple’s A5 chip.

This year, the race is on for quad-core chipsets that will bring to mobile computing power on par with some desktops. We’re expecting to see plenty of devices featuring quad-core chipsets from many of the above companies at CES. Qualcomm has the new Snapdragon S4, and Nvidia has Tegra 3, both of which will be able to run complex 3D games and high-definition video without a sweat. Qualcomm has one of the keynote speech slots, while Intel and Nvidia have press conferences on Monday.

Intel is finally stepping into the game with its new Atom-based mobile chipset, codenamed Medfield. It may not be initially as powerful as the competing Tegra and Snapdragon platforms, but after sitting out the mobile chipset wars until now, Intel has to start somewhere. The company will reportedly show off its first Medfield-based Android phone, built by LG, at CES.

The consumer cloud takes off

“Cloud” has been a code-word for enterprise for a while, but this year might be a big one for the consumer cloud. When iCloud and iTunes Match were introduced in mid-2011, we had a feeling that consumer-focused cloud technologies were about to start getting hot. Many other tech companies notably follow Apple’s lead, so it’s not hard to imagine other companies cashing in with their own cloud-based media services this year.

At CES, look out for companies showing off ways to connect your home and mobile devices with all sorts of media options. We expect cloud-based music and gaming to really get hammered into consumers heads, especially with connected TVs and mobile apps. Companies such as Verizon, Gaikai, Joyent , and Slacker will all be on CES panels discussing how to move forward with media in the cloud.

One company we expect to leave an impression at CES is Shodogg, which uses the web and cloud power to seamlessly move video content between screens, from TV to phone to computer. Another company that could shine is former DEMO winner WeVideo, which makes video editing in the cloud a reality.

Car tech revs up

As more car manufacturers develop electric engines and green solutions to help with gas mileage, they are also looking at ways to add more communication and media technology to vehicles. This year at CES, companies like Ford, GM, Mercedes-Benz and Audi will be showing off mobile apps that interact directly with cars and dashboards that function more like full-fledged computers. CES will also play host to a panel about cars that use short-range vehicle-to-X (V2X) technology that will allow cars to interact with other cars, traffic lights and pedestrians.

Ford specifically will be a big player in this space at CES with the introduction of a cloud-connected concept car that can beam data between cars and sync your schedule and music from home. The company will also show a beta version of its MyFord mobile app, which can find electrical charge points for electric engines and plan efficient routes using MapQuest.

With the ever-increasing demand that technology should help make driving safer, we can also expect that sort of tech getting a spotlight this year. CES will have a number of companies detailing technologies to help with “auto collision avoidance, land drift assistance, parking, speed monitoring, hands-free, text-to-voice, driver drowsiness detection and more.”

The start of a great year

While CES is bastion of consumer technology, there are still plenty of trends that will dominate the year that won’t have much of a showing at the trade show. One of the biggest is Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest operating system that will boldly attempt to unify a tablet and desktop interfaces. From what we’re hearing, Microsoft won’t be announcing much significant Windows 8 news at CES, though you can be sure plenty of other companies will have Windows 8-related news in tow.

Looking beyond CES, there’s plenty to look forward to this year: Tablets that won’t suck; the eventual release of Apple’s completely revamped iPhone (which we’re hoping will prove those iPhone 5 rumors true); and mostly for me, the many surprises that 2012 will bring.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Taiwanese computer manufacturer Asus has officially unveiled its Eee Pad Transformer Prime, the first-ever Android tablet with the Tegra 3 quad-core processor that allows smart devices to provide stunning graphics and power efficiency at the same time.

Asus is looking for any advantage it can to fight the Apple iPad 2, the Amazon Kindle Fire and top-tier Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The quad-core power of the Tegra 3, the new flagship processor from Nvidia that will help it transition into mobile chips, might be what Transformer Prime needs because the competition has dual-core chips. The Tegra 3 chip contains four cores plus an additional “companion core” that can handle small tasks and dramatically lower the power consumption of the entire chip.

On top of having a first-of-its-kind processor inside, the Transformer Prime features a 10-inch display with 1280-by-800 resolution, 1GB of RAM, a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat and an 8-megapixel camera with flash on the back. It weighs 1.29 pounds, measures just .33 inches thin and Asus claims it will last 12 hours on a single charge. With these sort of specs, it sounds like the most powerful Android tablet yet.

The Transformer will be available in early December at two price points, depending on internal flash storage. The model with 32GB of internal storage will run $499, while the model with 64GB storage will cost $599.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Chip-maker Nvidia is formally launching its Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor for smartphones and tablets. The company says the processor will make mobile devices much more visually stunning and power-efficient.

The chip is the new flagship for Nvidia’s drive to diversify beyond PC graphics into mobile devices. And in a new announcement, one of the major new customers for the chip is Asus, which will use Tegra 3 in its upcoming Android-based Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet.

Formerly known under the code name Project Kal-El, the Tegra 3 chip has a lot of horsepower for both computing and graphics. It has four cores, or computing brains, plus an additional “companion core” that is used to handle small tasks and dramatically lower the power consumption of the entire chip.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia, the world’s biggest independent stand-alone graphics chip maker, kept the latter core secret until recently, as it considers it a competitive advantage over other chip designs. Each ARM-based central processing unit (CPU) core on the Tegra 3 can automatically turn on or turn off as needed. If the cores aren’t needed, turning them off saves a great deal of power, allowing a mobile device with the chip to operate with a longer battery life.

Matt Wuebbling, product marketing manager for Tegra at Nvidia, said in a press call that the chip can operate with a single companion core at low-power levels and run a high-definition video for up to 12 hours on a single battery charge. Meanwhile, the four cores provide performance that is about three times better than last year’s Tegra 2 on graphics performance with 61 percent lower power consumption.

That is essentially bringing PC-like graphics performance to tablets and smartphones, Wuebbling said. Because the quad-core chip dynamically turns on and off its cores, it consumes less power than many dual-core chips. The companion core runs at 500 megahertz and is powerful enough to handle music and video playback, loading light graphics web sites, and updating background data.

The four cores start running when a device starts performing tasks such as heavy-graphics web browsing, multitasking, and gaming.

“Nvidia’s fifth core is ingenious,” said Nathan Brookwood, analyst at Insight 64. He said that the technology extends battery life for next-generation mobile devices and then ratchets up the performance in a just-in-time basis.

The quad-core CPUs are complemented with a new 12-core Nvidia GeForce graphics processing unit (GPU), which can deliver PC-like gaming effects such as dynamic lighting, physics effects, and stereoscopic 3D viewing.

Graphics is Nvidia’s specialty, but it will face a lot of competition from the likes of Qualcomm as well as ARM itself, which makes its own graphics cores that are licensed by other chip makers. The Tegra 3 supports game controllers and allows consumers to play games on the tablet, smartphone, or connect to a big screen to fully display a game in high resolution. Nvidia’s 3D Vision stereoscopic 3D technology works with the Tegra 3 chip as well. It accelerates Flash Player 11.1, HTML5, and WebGL browsing to enable faster web viewing. It is also quite fast at photo viewing and editing, as well as converting video from one format to another.

Nvidia has highlighted a number of demanding games that will run fast on Tegra 3, including Nvidia Tegra Zone featured apps such as Shadowgun THD, Riptide GP, Sprinkle, Big Top THD, Bladeslinger (pictured right), DaVinci THD and Chidori. By the end of 2011, about 40 games will be available to run on Tegra 3 and 15 more games are under development for the Android Market.

Marek Rabas, chief executive of Madfinger Games and maker of Shadowgun THD, said that the game will take advantage of graphics features such as rag-doll physics, high-quality water simulation, particle effects and more.

The four CPU cores are based on the ARM Cortex A9 core. The memory bandwidth is three times higher than the Tegra 2. The image signal processor runs twice as fast as the Tegra 2. Wuebbling said the Tegra 3 is in production now but declined to say when other customers would make announcements of new devices using the chip.

Sam Williams, general manager at Luma Arcade, said, “This is a recipe for all-day game play,” regarding the Tegra 3′s performance and power consumption. Nvidia has statements of support from dozens of other game makers.

After Tegra 3 launches, Nvidia will launch a new chip every year in the Tegra family. The chip, code-named Wayne, will launch in 2012. Logan will launch in 2013, and Stark will launch in 2014. While Tegra 3 has about five times the performance of Tegra 2, Wayne will have about ten times the performance of Tegra 2.

Nvidia says the Tegra 3 is two times faster at video transcoding than the Apple A5 chip used in the iPad 2, and it is also two times faster at stitching photos together than the A5.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We’re going to be seeing Nvidia’s dual-core Tegra 2 chip on a slew of devices this year, including Motorola’s Xoom tablet and LG’s Optimus 2X phone. Now it looks like Nvidia has quad-core ambitions for the chip’s next iteration, the Tegra 3, according to an internal slide revealed by Bright Side of News.

The news means we can expect even more powerful phones and tablets later this year and that the line between mobile devices and traditional computers will be blurred even further.

According to the slide, the tablet version of the Tegra 3 chip will run at speeds up to 1.5 gigahertz, support Blu-ray video and screen resolutions up to 1920 by 1200 pixels (slightly higher than 1080p high-definition video). The notion of Blu-ray drives in tablets is silly, but the chip’s support for it could mean that Nvidia envisions the Tegra 3 as something that can also be used in ultraportable laptops, all-in-one desktops or kiosks. Nvidia also touts an ultra low power mode that will prevent the CPU from being a battery hog.

The phone version of the Tegra 3 will be available in quad or dual-core varieties and support displays up to 1366 by 768 pixels in resolution, something most often seen in laptops around 13 inches. I can’t imagine why quad-core CPUs would be justified in a phone, but as a gadget geek it’s still exciting to see hardware boundaries pushed.

The same slide also reveals that Nvidia has a 3D version of the Tegra 2 on the horizon, which could be used to bring 3D capabilities to mobile devices.

Tegra 3 devices will start appearing at the end of the year.

Via Engadget