Hands-On at MWC 2011 with NVIDIA Kal-El Tablet

Some time ago, NVIDIA posted some info on the official blog about the plans for the successors to its ARM platform and it seems that its MWC 2011 exhibition had a tablet running a next-generation Kal-El chip.

While it has been taken out of the x86 chipset business, NVIDIA has nothing stopping it from building platforms based on the ARM architecture.

Granted, its first Tegra SoC didn't really get used in that many mobile phones, but the same cannot be said about Tegra 2.

While not overly popular on the smartphone market, this SoC has found a strong reception on the tablet market, as proven by the name slates shown at MWC 2011.

NVIDIA itself even took the time to speak about the successors to the existing Tegra and intends to make sure that the upcoming platforms are significantly stronger than the existing one.

The Tegra 3 is set to debut before the end of the ongoing year (2011) and is dubbed Kal-El, just like a certain Kryptonian.

The Santa Clara, Califonia-based GPU maker says that Kal-El will be the world' first mobile quad-core CPU and will have a 12-core NVIDIA GPU with support for Stereo 3D.

Finally, the platform will be able to handle resolutions of up to 2,560 x 1,600 (Extreme HD).

All in all, it should end up being about five times faster than what is on the market right now.

Since we weren't about to let a demonstration of the Kal-El pass by without a direct look, one of our colleagues managed to get a few shots of the tablet prototype running it.

As one will most likely not be surprised to hear, the capabilities of the processor were flaunted by having it run a fairly graphically-intensive game.

Of course, considering that Tegra 2 already handles multimedia in up to 1,080p quality, that the successor would run games is a natural step up.



Note: Fellow editors Cosmin Vasile and Alex Vochin are on the floor at the 2011 Mobile World Congress and are keeping us posted with pictures and live reports on the latest product previews and launches.