Expect Tegra 3 tablet from HTC at MWC 2012

Taiwanese handset maker HTC will launch a tablet powered by Nvidia’s new Tegra 3 chip at Mobile World Congress, which is scheduled to run February 27-March 1, 2012 in Barcelona, Spain. According to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report, quoted by DigiTimes:

The quad-core tablet PC is expected to launch prior to the release of Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system scheduled at the end of the third quarter of 2012, the paper indicated.

The report doesn’t mention which operating system HTC’s tablet will run, but we’re pretty confident it’ll be Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich because Windows 8 will not be ready for public consumption before the later half of 2012.

The article also mentions two new Android-drive smartphones from HTC at Mobile World Congress 2012, one of which will run Tegra 3 silicon (most likely the rumored Edge device).

According to Nvidia, the maker of Tegra- branded mobile chips, the new Tegra 3 chip packs in four ARM Cortex A9 processing cores that reach speeds of up to 1.3GHz (1.4GHz in single-core mode) and a GeForce GPU with twelve cores for three times the graphics performance of Tegra 2. The GeForce GPU supports gee-whiz features such as dynamic lighting, physical effects, high resolution environments and 3D stereo. The silicon also contains a fifth processing core which runs at just 500MHz to conserve power during undemanding tasks, such as checking your email, light web browsing etc.