According to NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, it can be quite safe to assume that concerns and issues surrounding the initial batch of Android-powered tablets “have been largely addressed”, so that would mean nothing but good news for the next generation of Android 3.1 Honeycomb-powered devices as vast improvements can be expected. Here’s an excerpt of Huang’s insight :-
A new wave of tablets are now ramping up and are even more affordable and available on retail channels with WiFi configurations all over the world. You’re also starting to see a lot of different shade of platforms, from devices that are like the Asus transformer where it is a tablet in one configuration and has a detachable keyboard in another configuration. And so those kind of devices are getting a lot of interest and available in computer channels all over the world.
We’re going to expect another wave of tablets that are coming out to the marketplace now, ones that are even thinner and even lighter than the best offerings from anyplace, any supplier in the world. And those devices are just in the process of ramping. There’s the really exciting new build of Honeycomb called Honeycomb 3.1 that Google just demonstrated the other day at Google I/O. We are basically stitching that up now.
NVIDIA is working hand in hand with Google on Ice Cream Sandwich, but declined to comment on whether the timing jived with their own quad-core chip known as Kal-El. Are good times ahead of Android tablet users? You be the judge, although duds like the XOOM don’t really help their cause.
There are two things that you need to keep in mind: 1/Android 3.1 is due for the end of the year. 2/ NVIDIA will probably not have to wait until Android 3.1 to release its Kal-El quad-core chip. The company said that the first quad-core tablets would appear this summer. Although Android 3.1 will be better optimized for multi-threading (using more cores), 3.0 can already benefit from 4 cores, at least, to some extent.
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