I have to say I was already impressed with Texas Instruments OMAP 5 announcement and even more so with Qualcomm Quad Core Snapdragon APQ8064, but NVidia new quad core processor and their processor roadmap really blew my mind.
NVidia Kal-El Quad Core Processor
NVidia was already 1 year ahead compared to other companies with the Tegra 2, the first dual core mobile processor, so the others are playing catch up. Whereas competitors quad core will be available later this year or early 2012, the new NVidia Quad Core processor codenamed Kal-El (Tegra 3?) is already sampling and is being demo’ed at MWC 2011 in Barcelona. One the video below you’ll see a web browser benchmark (NVbench) making use of all four cores.
Kal-El also have a new Geforce GPU with 12 cores, giving 5 times greater performance than Tegra 2.
NVidia also provided benchmark results (Coremark 1.0) showing that Kal-El was faster than an Intel Core2 Duo T7200.
NVidia Tegra Roadmap to 2014
NVidia also revealed the Tegra roadmap until 2014 with other projects codenamed Wayne, Logan, and Stark, coming out in a steady one-year cadence over the next three years.
What are they going to do with Stark with a 75 times performance boost compared to Tegra 2? I’m not so sure, but they indicated their customers would now what to do with it. We’ll have to wait until around 2015 to find it in devices such as smartphones, tablets, servers? and whatever new device may come up.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Quad core smartphone sounds tasty but what about the battery? My
dual-core Samsung Galaxy S2 is already a huge power drain as it is, only
lasting for no more than 4 hours with GPS, and 3G turned on.
It really heats up the battery to the point where it is un-chargable.
I do love the S2 nonetheless.
If the software is optimized, the more cores there are, the better the power efficiency is for a given task.
Wikipedia: Multi-core chips also allow higher performance at lower energy. This can be a big factor in mobile devices that operate on batteries. Since each core in multi-core is generally more energy-efficient, the chip becomes more efficient than having a single large monolithic core. This allows to get higher performance with less energy. The challenge of writing parallel code clearly offsets this benefit