MWC 2011: Nvidia to announce next generation Tegra 3 hardware tomorrow

The very high end silicon that's powering the new generation of large tablets and smartphone is one of the key trends of Mobile World Congress 2011.

Which is particularly great news for companies coming from the PC space such as Nvidia.

It's offered ARM-based CPU silicon combined with its own GeForce mobile GPU designs for a number of years under the Tegra brand.

Industry adoption has only recently taken off with its dual core GPU Tegra 2 architecture, however.

Not only is it powering a bunch of tablet hardware including Motorola Xoom and the LG Optimus 2X, but it's also found its way into smartphones such as the Motorola Atrix.

But with the likes of Qualcomm and ARM revealing quad core CPUs and GPUs, the former clocked at up to 2.5 GHz, it's time for Nvidia to announce its next generation.

Which is what it will be doing tomorrow with the announcement of Tegra 3.

Obviously details remain thin on the ground but quad core processors rated at 2+ GHz, supporting 3D visuals and Blu-ray playback, and offering four fold performance increase on the company's already impressive benchmark will be expected.

Nvidia is also stressing its speed of development and the deployment of devices. It had Tegra hardware on show MWC 2010. And a year on, hardware using Tegra 2 will be shipping next month.

Nvidia's advantage is as a pure GPU company, it can innovate very quickly.

Devices using the hardware should be available before the end of 2011.

It's also expected the company will be using its experience for employing GPUs for general computing operations; something it has long experience with in the PC world, and what is being supported on mobile with the new OpenCL programming standard.