Jun 16, 2011 20:01 GMT  ·  By

Expected to arrive latter this year, Nvidia's quad-core Kal-El SoC (system-on-a-chip) based on the ARM architecture will offer similar or even better battery life than the company's current Tegra 2 chips, claims a recent report that just hit the Web.

This news comes from Fudzilla which cites anonymous industry sources familiar with the development of the Nvidia SoC.

According to the same source, a next-generation Motorola Xoom tablet configured with an Kal-El chip which was tested by the company ended up delivering almost 10 hours of battery life under some undisclosed circumstances.

In order to achieve this feat, Nvidia has reportedly introduced a series of advanced power management features inside the cores, which end up saving an important amount of battery life in day to day usage scenarios.

Kel-El is the code name given by Nvidia to the successor of Tegra 2 and it features four ARM processing cores clocked at 1.5GHz as well as 12 graphics cores with support for 3D video. In addition, the integrated GPU is able to drive a 2560x1600 video output.

Nvidia states that all these changes can provide up to five times the speed of the dual-core Tegra 2 SoC, which should make Kal-El one of the fastest ARM-based chips around.

According to the information provided by Nvidia at this year's Mobile World Congress, Kal-El is already sampling and it should start making its appearance in tablets in August followed by smartphones this holiday season.

During the same event, Nvidia also presented its future mobile roadmap and this includes the Wayne SoC which is expected to appear in 2012, the 2013 Logan, and the 2014 Stark system-on-a-chip.

Wayne should perform 10 times faster than the current Tegra 2 chip whereas Stark is slated to perform at 100 times the speed of Tegra 2 in three years.