Tablet computers, which bowed last year, are having a power surge in 2012. Driven largely by gaming, Acer and Asus both unveiled quad core tablets with 1280×800 HD displays, running Android 4.
At the NVIDIA booth, an Asus ME370T quad core was on display. The 7-inch tablet is powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 processor with Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich).
The Asus model features an 8-megapixel camera and up to 64GB of internal storage. It starts at $249 and will be released in the first quarter.
Acer’s 10-inch Iconica A510 was also on display at the NVIDIA booth, touting a 5-megapixel camera, up to 32GB of internal storage, Blutooth, Wi-Fi and HDMI out.
The unit is expected to be released in the first half of the year. Pricing wasn’t available.
NVIDIA also had a prototype quad tablet running Windows 8.
The effectiveness in mobile devices of quad core processors, which typically run hot and suck battery life, has been the subject of debate. Competing chip manufacturer Texas Instruments is for the time being sticking with dual core chips loaded with graphics accelerators and Intel’s new Atom chip (Medfield) has a reimagined architecture that is essentially single core.
In terms of mobile gaming, the speed of the network will also be critical factor for cloud-based or multiplayer, real-time gaming. At CES, Qualcomm was demonstrating multiplayer tablet gaming between two players connected to a TV via HDMI cable, but linked to each other on Verizon’s 4G LTE network.
The expectation is that as power evolves, developers will create new apps to specifically take advantage of multiprocessor threading.
Tablet computers, which bowed last year, are having a power surge in 2012. Driven largely by gaming, Acer and Asus both unveiled quad core tablets with 1280×800 HD displays, running Android 4.
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