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The most hotly contested market in mobile silicon is the applications processor, even if other categories such as handset Wi-Fi have higher growth trajectories. As high end smartphones and tablets start to behave like PCs and consoles, some vendors think they will need quad-core chips with separate graphics or video units too, while others think the skill is to use fewer cores, but more effectively. Nvidia and Texas Instruments are on opposite sides of this divide for the upcoming generation, and this week the former officially showed off its much anticipated 'Kal-El' or Tegra 3 processor, a quad-core design whose first commercial device is the Asus EE Pad Transformer Prime tablet.

The Californian vendor claims that Tegra 3 provides up to three times the graphics performance with 61% lower power consumption compared to the previous generation Tegra 2, which has been highly successful in the nascent tablet sector. One of the innovations which helps prolong battery life is the previously discussed fifth 'companion core', which harnesses a patent pending technology known as variable symmetric multiprocessing (vSMP). Low power, routine tasks are offloaded to this fifth core while the main four concentrate on intensive processing. When low power activities like listening to music are ongoing, the four main cores are shut down.

The Tegra 3 ARM Cortex-A9 CPUs are complemented with a new 12-core GeForce graphics processing unit geared to ultra-realistic effects such as dynamic lighting. The platform also leverages Nvidia's 3D Vision technology and converts OpenGL apps to stereo 3D, for viewing on a large screen 3DTV via HDMI. Other claims include accelerated web tools including Flash Player 11, HTML5 and WebGL and an optimized Javascript engine.

Over at TI, the company is looking ahead to the next generation of its OMAP processor family, which will go up against Tegra 3. The firm says its future app processors will be able to render holographic displays, HD augmented reality, real time voice translation and natural speech interaction.

As well as targeting the boundaries of multimedia experience on high end mobile gadgets, Avner Goren, director of strategic marketing for wireless terminals, told EETimes that he expects to push OMAP5 and beyond into new classes of device, including e-readers, in-car systems, low power computers and even robotics. Part of this will be driven by TI's close alliance with Google for Android, which saw OMAP4 as the first processor to run the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich release of the Google OS. And, while Qualcomm has a near monopoly of processors optimized for WP7, Microsoft selected TI as the flagship ARM-based platform to run Windows 8.

"Many different industry segments are starting to pick Android as an operating system because it comes with an entire ecosystem of its own," Goren said. "The R&D investment in OMAP is significant, but tailoring and repackaging it for, say, use in cars or tablets is an incremental effort," he said. OMAP is already included in the Barnes & Noble NOOKcolor e-reader and its latest handset wins are the Motoroal Droid RAZR and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

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