Nvidia will announce its first quad-core smartphones at Mobile World Congress 2012, which will kick off at the end of this month in Barcelona. Nvidia will host an exclusive event on Feb. 27 to announce the new smartphones. The company said that its Tegra 3 "quad-core performance and battery life are transforming the mobile marketplace." During CES 2012, we had a look at the details behind the Tegra 3 quad-core processor with the introduction of the first official quad-core tablets. The Tegra 3 has actually five CPU cores: The usual four cores are helped by a companion core, which is used to handle low power tasks and extend battery life. So, when your phone or tablet is idling, the quad-core chipset will be off and these low power operations will be handled by this companion fifth chip. The same thing happens when you need to do some high-powered stuff, such as playing high-end games or heavy multitasking. The companion chip turns off and the quad-cores begin to work. Here is a video made by Nvidia to compare the performance of the competition with the Tegra 3 processor. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gl-UGVhmAA]