We’ve seen a few phones here and there and a few notable mentions at CES, but perhaps the year’s biggest tech revolution exists in the mobile chip industry. CPUs are getting more powerful and 2010 may give rise to more powerful smartphones, mobile tablets, and smartbooks that may match your computer’s basic processing power. Here are a few chipmakers and their offerings at CES:

NVIDIA Tegra 2:

The NVIDIA Tegra 2 is based on the ARM Cortex-A9 engine, which promises some amazing performance. The previous generation Tegra was used in the Zune HD. Here’s what the second iteration delivers:

- 16 hours + of HD video play back!

- Adobe Flash Player 10.1 support

- 1080p video decoding

- Powerful!

According to Geek.com, the power that ARM-based chips deliver is quite amazing: What blew us away was ARM’s recent performance video pitting a netbook with an Intel 1.6GHz Atom processor and a GPU versus a development board running only a 500MHz Cortex-A9 processor. The Cortex-A9 machine matched the Atom chip in browser rendering, even though it had no GPU and was clocked three times slower.

With the Tegra 2, NVIDIA will bring some powerful graphics for some nice gaming as well. Hopefully, we’ll see some Tegra 2 in some gaming smartphones soon.

Marvell:

Another name in the mobile CPU industry as Marvell, and the company is promising quad-core ARM-based performance on its chipset, capable of 1 GHz or more per core! (via: Bright Side of News)

Qualcomm:

Another ARM-based maker, Qualcomm recently announced its dual-core ARM-based Snapdragon chip. A single-core version can clock in up to 1.3 GHz and dual-core model of the Snapdragon will go up to 1.5 GHz.

Intel:

Intel is using the Moorestown chip, which is not based on ARM. Rather, it is a power efficient Atom chip, which have made their way into netbooks and small-sized tablets. The Moorestown chipset has recently been implemented in a phone by LG called the LG GW 990, which has a wide 1024 X 480 screen and can connect to an external display and output at a resolution of 720p. (via: Computer World and Engadget)