Enable 10.1-inch tablets to reach pixel densities over 400ppi

Sep 20, 2011 12:05 GMT  ·  By

With its next-generation of system-on-a-chip solution for mobile devices, Nvidia will push the maximum resolution supported to a whopping 2560x1600, enabling tablet manufacturers to push for never reached before pixel densities.

According to Fudzilla, this resolution will be supported by all the other Nvidia SoC devices that will arrive after Kal-El.

Building a 10.1-inch tablet with a resolution of 2560x1600 would result in a screen capable of displaying a little more than 400ppi, an impressive achievements considering that most slates available now rarely go above 100ppi.

Kal-El will be the successor of the current Tegra 2 and it features no less than four processing cores based on the ARM Cortex A9 architecture, which are clocked at 1.5GHz, as well as 12 graphics cores with support for 3D video.

According to Nvidia, this configuration will be able to provide up to five times the speed of the dual-core Tegra 2 SoC, making Kal-El one of the fastest ARM-based chips around.

In addition to its raw processing speed, the Tegra 3 integrated graphics will also support a series of advanced features such as anti-aliasing.

All these will be achieved by using the same amount of power as Tegra 2, as Nvidia introduced a series of optimizations meant to keep power consumption in check.

At this year's Mobile World Congress, Nvidia stated that Kal-El was already sampling to its partners.

After introducing Kal-El at the end of this summer, Nvidia will concentrate its efforts on the 2012 Wayne SoC that will come in two different configurations, depending on the type of devices it will be used in.

The first version is a quad-core design clocked at 1.5GHz, based on a yet-undisclosed ARM architecture (most probably Cortex-A15) which will include at least a 24-core GPU that resembles the contemporary graphics architectures, while the second one features eight ARM processing cores and 32 to 64 GPU cores that are DirectX 11+ compliant.