The big story coming out of Mobile World Congress 2012 is the launch of multiple phones with the quad-core Tegra chipset made by NVIDIA. Consumers may see “quad-core” and immediately think it’s much better than a dual core but Qualcomm is saying that it’s more complicated than that.
While it has its own quad-core chips coming down the line, Qualcomm believes its dual-core S4 will outperform the the quad-core chips from the competition because the company has done a lot of system-wide optimization. Qualcomm’s Rob Chandhok said Qualcomm is focused on providing a great, real-life user experience rather than trying to be first to the market.
He also said that some of the competition brags about performance but Qualcomm wants to provide chips that produce high performance over a long period of time. The Qualcomm S4 “outperforms any quad-core [he] knows,” and early benchmarks may back that up.
It’s not just performance though, as Qualcomm also thinks about how these devices literally feel in your hand. Chandhok said the heat produced by its products are significantly less than the competition and this opens the door for innovative design that won’t annoy the user’s palm.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out he was talking mainly about NVIDIA, even if he never mentioned competitors by name. The Tegra 3 chipset is in some of the most desirable devices at the show and you just know that bugs Qualcomm a bit. NVIDIA is still quite an upstart in this space and it seems dedicated to pushing the envelope and iterating quickly.
Still, Qualcomm is the big dog in this fight and it is facing some competition from all angles. Along with NVIDIA, Texas Instruments is producing some cool stuff and Intel just unveiled its ambitious efforts to disrupt the mobile market. Having all these really smart companies fighting for a very important market should benefit all of us because this competition will require everyone to raise its game.