Nvidia's mobile monster chip, the Tegra 3, challenges Intel and Apple

When we thought about a computer, we always thought about power, by which we meant speed. However, as we shift from desktop computers to smartphones, tablets and laptops, we think about power in a different way: How long is the battery going to last?

Intel has the upper hand against longtime rival AMD, but it’s being challenged in the post-PC era by a new competitor: ARM. To see the challenge to Intel, you only have to look at Nvidia’s just released ARM-based multi-core monster, the Tegra 3.

[caption id=“attachment_127624” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The Asus Transformer Prime will be one of the first tablets with Nvidia’s Tegra 3”]  [/caption]

Earlier this year, Nvidia demoed what the industry press thought was a the quad-core Tegra, at the time codenamed Kal El, (that’s Superman’s real name if you’re not a comic buff). Well, we thought it was a quad-core, but now that Kal El has been released as the Tegra 3, we know that it’s actually a five-core chip. That doesn’t include the 12-core Nvidia graphics processor that brings a lot of other visual treats to the platform.

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The previously undisclosed core, what Nvidia is calling a companion core, handles basic tasks, leaving the other four high performance cores to kick in only when needed such as when playing video or games. It’s another trick to make sure that Tegra3 uses as little energy as possible.

Nvidia says that the new chip has three times the performance of the previous generation of Tegra dual-core chips that powered Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, while also consuming 61 percentless power. Nvidia also says that the new chip will have as much power of Intel’s dual-core Core Duo 2 laptop chips. The Core Duo 2 were Intel’s laptop chips from two generations ago and were first introduced in 2006 and phased out two years ago.

Regardless, Nvidia’s new Tegra3 chip really raises the bar for mobile performance, and the company claims that despite the extra performance, the new chip sips even less power than its predecessor.

Tegra3 is just the first in a long line of monster mobile chips that Nvidia is planning. They have showed off their Tegra roadmap earlier this year that showed plans to release a new chip every year for the next three years.

At the moment, successors for Tegra3 have the superhero-based codenames just as Tegra3 did before its official release. Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told the AsiaD conference last month, that all three successors to Tegra3 - Wayne, Logan and Stark, referring to Batman, Wolverine and Ironman - were all already being produced in Nvidia’s labs.

Lower power will also be a boon to Indian tablet and laptop users. Better energy efficiency means tech that runs cooler. You won’t have to worry as much about tech cooking itself to death on hot days.

A new battle for chip supremacy

Intel and ARM are now locked in a power battle, trying to squeeze more power into ever more energy-efficient chips. The competition is good for consumers and business, and the lower power requirements of the latest chips from both Intel and ARM are good for the environment.

Tegra and ARM now start to challenge laptops for power while also boasting the power efficiency needed for mobile, and here is where Microsoft comes into the frame. Windows 8 has already been shown running on ARM chips. One major challenge for Microsoft and software developers will be that software which runs on Intel or AMD chips on Windows 8 will have to be recompiled to run on systems using ARM-based chips. However, Microsoft established its dominance in part by writing good tools for developers, and the hope is that they will make this process as simple as possible.

Regardless, we’ll have three major operating systems, four if you count Linux, running tablets, notebooks and other devices. The line between tablets and full-powered computers will blur as these new multi-core chips bring a lot more processing power to mobile devices. We’ll have mobile kit with chips boasting the power of today’s laptops while also pushing the envelope for battery life, possibly from hours into more than a day.

Throwing down the gauntlet for Apple

The launch of Tegra3 will also push Apple. As Tegra3 launched, Taiwanese tech giant Asus introduced its Transformer Prime, a tablet that can be mated with a full keyboard. The Transformer Prime will go on sale next month with a starting price of $499.

This won’t be the first time that the iPad will lag behind its Android-based competition. The iPad launched with a single core chip and the dual-core iPad 2 launched little more than a year later. Apple launched its dual-core iPad 2 just as tablets with Nvidia’s dual-core Tegra2 came out earlier this year. Will Apple respond to the coming wave of quad-core Android tablets that we’ll see coming out soon?

Of course, when it comes to Apple, rumour is all we have. I’ve long enjoyed the Kremlinology that is involved in divining Apple’s future products. Veteran Apple-watchers scour both mainstream new sources and obscure Asian sites for leaks about orders that Apple might be placing. Several blogs have quoted the Taiwan Economic News as reporting that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, known by most in the industry as TSMC, has already begun trial production of Apple’s next generation mobile chip, the A6.

Rumours continue to swirl around whether the A6 will be quad-core and, of course, it might be dual-core for the iPhone and quad-core for the iPad. The quad-core iPad might not come out until 2012, giving the Android tablets a slight edge.

This will push the chip makers, hardware manufacturers and incumbents like Intel, Microsoft and Apple to work harder not just to bring more power to their devices but make those same devices consume less power. Welcome to the next revolution in computing. It is a pitched battle for the companies building the future, but a boon for consumers buying it.