Last week, Nvidia teased us with a roadmap of its Tegra system on a chip (SoC). Kal-El, the company’s third generation SoC has been delayed a number of months as it originally expected the first Kal-El-equipped tablets would be shipped in August. Now, the company is looking for a release sometime in the fourth quarter.
Nvidia’s General Manager of Mobile Business Mike Rayfield said that Kal-El will have five cores, enabling it to consume less power than chips from Texas Instruments Inc. (TXN) and Qualcomm, as well as their own Tegra 2 chip that are currently installed in devices like the Motorola Xoom.
“Anything any dual core can do…I do it better with lower power in my quad core,” said Rayfield. “It really did come into a lower power envelope than a dual core and much higher peak performance.”
The company now introduces a fifth, companion core, to handle the system’s low power tasks, similar to running a system in sleep mode, checking emails and keeping the device alive when reading a book. When the companion core is running, other cores can be shut down.
Nvidia does not want to use the companion core to handle heavy loads, or it would start consuming too much power. In order to do so, the core’s frequency has been set with a range of 0 to 0.5 GHz.
So, the new chipsets will be quad core that just has an additional companion core to conserve power. With the new 4 + 1 set up, the Kal-El will provide a boost to a devices battery life, even with its additional cores.
via: Anandtech
Thats awesome, Im waiting to see multi core ARM CPU's invading full powered laptop space, now that is going to be interesting, given ARM size and power consumption we could see some remarkable new designs in fully featured laptop designs. Intel will have run for its money, thats for sure ;)!