14 DAY TRIAL // Before the end of the ongoing year, the first mobile devices powered by quad-core application processors are expected to become available on the market, and they should be based on Nvidia's Kal El system-on-chip. Media tablets and high-end smartphones packing the processor are expected to arrive on shelves during the fourth quarter of the ongoing year, Nvidia said in early 2011.
When made available, these devices should deliver far more performance when compared to those powered by Nvidia's current SoC, Tegra 2.
The company claims that its quad-core chip will offer up to five times more performance than the Tegra 2 CPU, which means that very powerful mobile devices should arrive on the market in the near future.
"Kal-El is going to be world's first quad-core [ARM] processor [for ultra-portable devices]. It has so much higher performance than Tegra 2 and at so much lower power,” Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia, reportedly stated.
“Very few people have internalized that Kal-El is lower power in every use case compared to Tegra 2,” the company's CEO continues.
At the same time, Nvidia claims that the new SoC is far more power efficient when compared to the previous chip, and is confident that it will prove successful on the mobile market.
Back in February, Nvidia demoed the capabilities of its CPU at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
The company showed at the time how its Tegra 3 chip could browse the web, run games and playback videos in HD resolution.
At the end of May, Nvidia made available a demo of chip's capabilities, Glowball, which can be seen below. More info on the demo can be found here.
The full specs of Kal El were not unveiled for the time being, but we know that it is based on four Cortex-A9 application cores, complemented by a GeForce graphics processor.