Vulkan is coming to Android. Photo: Samsung

Apple Metal, introduced at last year’s WWDC, gives developers low-level access to the GPU to maximize the graphics and performance potential of their games. Now Android gamers are going to get a taste of that, too.

No, Apple isn’t bringing Metal to Android — but Google is adopting an alternative called Vulkan.

Monitoring the speed of your smartphone’s processor can be hugely beneficial, particularly to those with battery life problems who may have installed buggy apps that aren’t idling in the background. And now it couldn’t be simpler to keep an eye on CPU information at all times, thanks to a new tweak that puts real-time speeds in your status bar.

NEC has some pretty crazy ideas when it comes to smartphone design — as we discovered when we checked out the dual-screen Medias W at Mobile World Congress back in February. And its latest offering is just as outlandish.

Meet the Medias X 06E — the world’s first smartphone with a water-cooled CPU.

NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 processor powers some of today’s most impressive Android devices, and you certainly wouldn’t call it dated. But the company has another processor up its sleeve that blows the Tegra 3 right out of the water. A slide, purportedly detailing the next-generation Tegra 4 (nicknamed “Wayne”), has been leaked — and it reveals that NVIDIA plans to bring a “Quad Core Eagle” CPU with 72-core graphics to your smartphone.