HTC’s Next Tablet Will Be Quad Core

HTC CEO Peter Chou says the company’s next tablet effort won’t be a “me-too” product, but rather one that stands out from the competition. Just how the company proposes to manage that isn’t yet clear, though some early details are beginning to emerge.

The most noteworthy, the tablet HTC plans to show off at Mobile World Congress 2012, will run on one of Nvidia’s quad-core processors. The most likely candidate here is the Tegra 3, an A9-based chip that Nvidia says offers three times the performance of its dual-core predecessors, as well as improved multitasking and smoother app performance.

Of course, HTC isn’t the only company plotting a Tegra 3-based tablet. Indeed, at our recent AsiaD conference, Asus Chairman Johnny Shih showed off the company’s next-generation Transformer tablet, noting that it, too, would ship with the quad-core Nvidia chip.