Nvidia Wants to Pack multi-core CPUs into mobile devices
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Bangalore: Graphics specialist Nvidia is looking to pack multi-core CPUs in into mobile devices like smartphones and tablets as a way to improve performance while preserving battery life. The latest white paper published from the company said, "Dual-core processors will be the standard in 2011, and quad-core is coming in the near future." Adding CPU cores for faster task execution can improve the performance of tablets and smartphones while retaining battery life. Adding processor cores is an alternative to cranking up CPU clock speeds to boost performance, which could lead to excessive heat dissipation and power draw. The mobile devices will follow the same trend seen to improve the performance of laptops and desktops. Chip makers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices continually added processor cores to PCs as a power-efficient way to boost performance. Today PCs run on dual-, quad- or six-core processors. Nvidia is already shipping its dual-core Tegra 2 chip for tablets, which includes two Arm processor cores and a GeForce graphics core. The company previously said it would deliver Tegra 2 chips for smartphones in the fourth quarter. Experts have also agreed that smartphone and tablet application developers face a challenge in writing programs for execution across multiple CPUs, co-processors and hardware accelerators. Many applications fail to take advantage of the accelerators because they were written for execution across a limited number of cores on old chips, and a lot of the old code needs to be rewritten for the new chips. It is true that thought the white paper Nvidia provided an interesting infographic which explains how a mobile device may split up the computing tasks associated with browsing a web page across multiple CPU cores. The firm also pointed out that the Tegra ultra low power GeForce GPU is able to accelerate Flash processing work and thereby relieve the CPUs of much of the grunt work.

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