NVIDIA CEO Huang confirms we will see quad-core tablets by the end of the year

Sitting down to chat with Forbes, Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA's President and CEO, confirmed that NVIDIA's quad-core chip, currently known as "Kal-El", will be under the hood, powering up some tablets before the end of this year. As far as smartphones are concerned, as we reported, Huang says not to expect a quad-core flavored cell phone until next year.

While NVIDIA's Tegra 2 dual-core processor only graces the innards of high-end smartphones these days, currently totaling more than 100 million such equipped handsets shipped, Huang says that things will really start humming once NVIDIA starts to supply the low and mid-range handsets. The executive says that he will be happy to become a mainstream supplier to the market. Right now, the company controls 50% of the Android smartphone market and 70% of the Android tablet market. The outspoken President and CEO says that right now, when it comes to providing chips for high-end smartphones, the only serious players are NVIDIA and Qualcomm.

As we reported, NVIDIA's recently acquired baseband processor maker Icera. This should help it achieve the goal of spreading out to low and mid-end handsets. By Q2 next year, NVIDIA plans on offering a platform made up of Icera's technology integrated with NVIDIA's Tegra mobile processors. At present, NVIDIA's GPU unit brings in $4.5 billion, more than double the $2 billion for its mobile business. But by 2015, when NVIDIA could be shipping 1 billion mobile processors a year according to Huang, annual mobile revenue could be $20 billion vs. $7.5 billion for the GPU unit.

source: Forbes