Nvidia's Senior Vice President of Content & Technology, Tony Tamasi, has told bit-tech that the next generation of mobile devices will be more powerful than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
"The PS3 and Xbox 360 are barely more powerful than mobile devices. The next click of mobile phones will outperform [them]" Tamasi said, referring to Nvidia's successor to the Tegra 4 chip set which will feature in the company's Project Shield, among other devices.
Of course, the PS3 and Xbox 360 have been on the market nearly eight years with work designing their system architectures starting some years before that. Both consoles sport chips of around 200 giga flops while Nvidia's Tegra 4 currently boasts 80GFlops. The Tegra 3 ran at a mere 12GFlops suggesting new devices powered by Nvidia's next generation chips will be very close if not equal to what those consoles offer.
The PS4 sports a chip set of 1.8 tera flops while Nvidia's top of the range PCs come with chips of 4.5 tera flops.
While it's entirely plausible Sony and Microsoft's consoles will be overtaken sooner rather than later by mobile there are other considerations to take into account, including battery life, which somewhat limit mobile devices relative to home consoles.
Wander over here to read why we think Project Shield is doomed to fail, mostly because it has nothing to do with The Avengers (not really).