Before the year is over we will have devices with the next-gen Tegra chip, also known as Project Kal-El. They will sport the world’s first mobile quad-core processor combined with a 12-core NVIDIA GPU. The video shows it's capable of true dynamic lighting rendered in real time coupled with drapes waving around realistically.

So what you think? Mobile is catching on, it only needs content

Nvidia continues to overhype its Tegra line, news at 11:00.

Nvidia chips are good, but they've never been the top-of-the-line powerhouses that the company makes them out to be. They're just trying to leverage Nvidia's brand power into the mobile space because the average PC gamer has never heard of PowerVR.

Check out these benchmarks for an example:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4216/apple-ipad-2-gpu-performance-explored-powervr-sgx543mp2-benchmarked/2

So if Kal-El delivers the promised 5X power increase over the Tegra 2, it will be a mere 25% faster than an already shipping PowerVR SoC. Thing is, the Kal-El is using 16(!) cores, while the A5 uses only 4. Simply double the cores of the A5 (A6 coming in spring '12?) and watch PowerVR crush Nvidia again.

The real question is: How many watts do these things chew up to achieve this kind of performance?

Future? Wadabout nowadays:

Does seem that Nvidia is always trying to keep up with the Apple, although this year they (say) are releasing it earlier. It really is impressive that next year, with the HD display these devices will have, what kind of performance can we expect out of them? These things evolve so fast something new is always only 6 months away.

@NiKKoM: Yeah, content.

On Tegra, Nvidia always over-promises and misses targets on features, performance and most importantly power consumption. OEMs therefore drop them from their designs and go with other ARM SoC makers, which is why we saw nearly zero Tegra and Tegra 2 products unless Nvidia almost pays them to take it (Zune). Will also be true for this.

5x the performance is misleading as it does not refer to specifically CPU or GPU performance in some benchmark or average of benchmarks.

Their technology is no better than all of the other ARM SoCs. They just promise it sooner than the rest which is unrealistic.

GPU power isn't barrier even for todays high end mobile devices - but the problem lies in lack of buttons/analog/d-pads to allow more complicated games.

When PS5/Xbox 4/Wii 3 launch, I feel they will be mobile devices with wireless HDMI, Wireless Internet and Wireless Bluetooth controllers.