New Nvidia Roadmap Unveils Kal-El+ and Grey Tegra Chips

Nvidia has recently held a presentation during the Citi Technology Conference about its future plans regarding the mobile space, where it unveiled a new roadmap that introduced two new Tegra chips called Kal-El+ and Grey.

The presentation was held by the company's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, and one of the most important surprises to make make their appearance was the introduction of a new chip that goes by the name of Kal-El+.

According to the roadmap, this is expected to launch in 2012, and will come as an intermediary between the upcoming Kal-El system-on-a-chip and the Wayne SoC.

No information regarding the specifications of Kal-El+ were unveiled during the conference, but judging by its name it appears that it won't be nothing more than a slightly enhanced version of the original Kal-El meant to fill the performance gap until Wayne arrives.

Details are just as sketchy when we move to the second new Tegra SoC to make its appearance on Nvidia's roadmap, which goes by the name of Gray.

One possible explanation for Gray could be that the chip is the code name used by Nvidia for the smartphone version of Wayne, as this will be available in two SKUs that target different segments of the market.

If this turns out to be indeed the case, then Gray could feature four ARM (most probably Cortex-A15) processing cores with a clock speed of 1.5GHz as well as a 24-core GPU that resembles the contemporary graphics architectures.

According to some previous leaks, this configuration should deliver triple-digit GFLOPS performance, while also keeping the per-core power consumption of the Kal-El SoC.

Outside of the new chips, Jen-Hsun Huang also mentioned the company's release plans for Kal-El, which Nvidia states it will start arriving in tablets October, but retail availability of these products isn't expected until later in 2011. (via Heise)