This almost defies belief, quad-core processors supporting video up to 2560×1600 (how about that for ‘retina’ display…)
We reported on the stunning TI chip a couple of days ago, now a quad-core mobile processor is on the way:
NVIDIA SoCs Goes Quad-core with “Kal-El”, More Superhero Friends on the Way
Brandon Hill (Blog) – February 16, 2011 12:06 AM
The rate of advancement in system-on-chip (SoC) designs for smartphones and tablets is advancing at a rapid rate. It was too long ago that we were marveling at single-core designs approaching 1GHz core clocks, but we are now seeing single- and dual-core processors surpassing the 1GHz mark and the announcement of quad-core processors.
NVIDIA is the latest to throw its hat in the ring with the announcement of its Kal-El tablet processor (whether this chip will be officially called Tegra 3 has not yet been determined). NVIDIA is making some big claims with this quad-core processor (Kal-El also features a 12-core GPU):
- It will have 5x the performance of the current Tegra 2 SoC
- It will have lower power consumption than Tegra 2 despite the increase in performance
- It has the ability to output video at up to 2560×1600
A Coremark 1.0 benchmark result of Kal-El in action shows it absolutely obliterating its Tegra 2 predecessor (11,354 for Kal-El versus 5,840 for the Tegra 2). In fact, it was even faster than an Intel T7200 Core 2 Duo processor (2GHz, 4MB cache) that managed to pull in a score of 10,136.
Of course this is just a single benchmark so we shouldn’t get too excited yet; but these early numbers look very promising. Also keep in mind that clock speeds have not been finalized, so we don’t know exactly what kind of performance we’ll be seeing in production silicon.
NVIDIA is currently sampling Kal-El, and is prepared to have the chip in production tablets by the third quarter of 2011. In comparison, Qualcomm’s recently announced quad-core APQ8064 won’t even sample until early 2012.
It’s interesting to note that Kal-El isn’t the only “superhero” SoC that will be coming from NVIDIA — the codenames for it follow-up designs include Wayne (2012), Logan (2013), and Stark (2014). Wayne will arrive one year after Kal-El, Logan will arrive a year after that, etc. By 2014, Stark is expected to offer 75 times the performance of Tegra 2.
