NVIDIA Tegra Zone officially launched, taking Android to new dual-core heights

It's the first of March, which in NVIDIA land means no longer just talking about Tegra Zone, but actually activating it and letting users see what all the fuss is about. For those who've not yet heard of it, the Tegra Zone is an Android application that curates and highlights content that would most benefit from having the dual-core power of that Tegra 2 chip within your device. At launch, that means a hand-picked selection of games whose makers have gone the extra mile and thrown in additional geometric detail, heavier computation loads, and higher-resolution textures specifically for Tegra 2 smartphones and tablets. The snazzier, more interactive games will still be sourced from the Android Market, the Tegra Zone is no more than a portal unto the vast world of Android content, but it's hoped that its presence will help convey the full value of owning a dual-core mobile device. Even if that value will go down considerably when NVIDIA introduces its quad-core SOC in August -- but, one super chip at a time!

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The dual-core phone that runs on Android and Ubuntu

'On the edge of a narrow bench sat a rattly-looking development unit – the kind of device phone and chip makers use to test hardware before squeezing it into the shiny, sleek chassis I’ve seen so many times over the past three days. But that’s not the interesting part: ARM was using it to demonstrate the benefits of multicore mobile processors, the sort so many of the new devices this year are set to employ.
The Texas Intruments OMAP 4 chip inside it is based on ARM’s Cortex-A9 architecture and in the video below it’s shown running Android 2.3 and Ubunutu 10.04 simultaneously.'

ARM also showed us a quick demonstration of how much more power the latest dual-core processors offer over their single-core counterparts. This time two bare boards, each sporting identical Nvidia Tegra 2 chips (again based on ARM’s Cortex-A9 architecture), with one running at full power and the other with one of its cores disabled, are seen rendering a sequence of locally cached web pages.
The dual-core processor streaks ahead, understandably, but it’s the margin of difference that’s the real eye-opener. Check out the video below – it’s quite revealing.