With the world’s first dual-core phone announced, we can only get more excited for what’s coming. Dual-core phones promise great speed and power to your phones and as more and more phones get announced with this technology, you might start to wonder if now is a good time to get a new phone.
With devices just now coming out, we could already be looking at quad-core phones coming before the end of the year. So far, Sony is the first to announce a quad-core device, expected to release later this year. Sony will be releasing its next generation PSP, codenamed Next Generation Portable (NGP). It will have a quad-core Cortex-A9 processor with PowerVR SGX543MP4+ GPU.
And it’s not only Sony. Nearly all companies are working on Quad-core processors, but only two will be the likely candidates for releasing something this year–NVIDIA and Freescale.
Although not well-known, Freescale powers eReaders, like the Amazon Kindle and navigation devices, such as Ford SYNC. Earlier in the month, Freescale announced their low power i.MX6 system-on-a-chip (SoC) quad-core processor, A-9 based running at 1.2 GHz each. Freescale claims it processes twice of Samsung’s Hummingbird and they are expecting to release later this year, even though no manufacturers have picked it up.
NVIDIA could be the likely winner in being the first to release a quad-core device. Their Tegra 2 has already made a quite a splash in the mobile world. But now Tegra 3 has been tested already since last quarter 2010 and is rumored to be announced at Mobile World Congress (MWC) next month. NVIDIA states that Tegra 3 features four Cortex-A9 cores running at 1.5 GHz each and a GeForce GPU that can deliver three times the graphics performance of Tegra 2. No manufacturers have picked it up but they are shopping around.
So the race is on to become the first to offer a quad-core device. Who will win??
Via AndroidAndMe