The Nvidia Tegra 4 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 may be taking mobile devices to places they didn’t know existed and opening up a whole new realm of mobile gaming possibilities. However, don’t count on these CPUs eclipsing consoles any time soon – at least according to Qualcomm’s own Mike Yuen in conversation with Games Industry International.
“At some point there is a limit [for mobile devices]. We’re never going to build a chip that’s faster than a console – in the truest sense.
“The experiences will be different. The underlying technology will be there in hundreds of millions of devices, and that will increase each year. It’s just that, as a developer, I don’t think the intention is, ‘I’m going to build a Blu-ray disc’s worth of game on a mobile phone.’ That just doesn’t make sense.”
Considering that Yuen has worked on the Zeebo, which aimed to bring console-style games to mobile phones back in 2009 and eventually failed, he knows what he’s talking. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to note games like Deus Ex: The Fall and XCOM: Enemy Unknown for mobile devices.