Forget dual-core smartphones and tablets – those are so last month – quad-core mobile processing is all the rage these days. This week at Mobile World Congress, NVIDIA announced that they will be the first to market with quad-core mobile processors for tablets in August and smartphones by Christmas of this year.

The company showed off the first demonstration of their new quad-core technology, code-named Kal-El, at the conference with a prototype Android tablet device. The chipset sports four ARM Cortex-A9 cores and a 12-core GPU, which they say will deliver five times the performance of their current Tegra 2 chipset, which has only two ARM Cortex-A9 and eight graphics cores. Kal-El, NVIDIA says, is capable of outputting 2560x1600 resolution at 300 DPI on 10.1-inch tablets or even full-sized TVs and monitors.What does this development mean for gaming? Quite a bit, actually. Though there is still much we don't know about Sony's powerful new portable, the NGP, we do know that it uses a quad-core CPU and a quad-core GPU to produce PlayStation 3-quality graphics on a handheld. By comparison, the Kal-El packs an additional 4 GPU cores on top of the NGP's 8, which could yield richer, more complex graphics.If the Kal-El was applied to a tablet, for instance, it could potentially enable mobile platforms like webOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7 to play games of a quality similar to the NGP. Of course, there would have to be considerable effort on the software side to make hardcore gaming on those platforms truly viable, but it is at least technologically feasible.Who knows where the Kal-El will end up, but it's clear that NVIDIA has big plans for the future – the company plans to announce progressively more powerful mobile chipsets every year for the next three years. In 2014, NVIDIA will introduce a chipset with 75-times the power of Tegra 2, a product they've code-named Project Stark.Of course, NVIDIA isn't the only player in the space, and Qualcomm plans to offer next-gen chipsets in 2012, but they may have the virtue of being amongst the first and one of the more graphically-focused.