Quad-Core ARM-Based NVIDIA Super Chip Is Called Kal-El

Since NVIDIA's Tegra 2 platform seems to be booming now that tablets are getting launched left and right, the company decided to get serious with its next ARM platform, using MWC 2011 as an opportunity to speak on project Kal-El.

No doubt end-users will have heard about the many tablets on show at the Mobile World Congress 2011 expo in Barcelona.

Some recent examples could be the ViewSonic ViewPad 10, Acer's Iconia Tab A100 and ZTE's V11 tablet, among other things.

Many of the new slates run on the NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC (system-on-chip), known for its high multimedia capabilities.

Nevertheless, this product is bound to be surpassed at some point, so NVIDIA is already working on the successor.

As a sort of homage to a certain superhero the entire world knows about, the Santa Clara, California-based company named the upcoming ARM platform Project Kal-El.

It will supposedly be about five times better than Tegra 2 and the folks over at Slashgear even say they got to see a demonstration.

To be more specific, a game by War Drum Studios Great Battles Medieval was played on the Kal-El and supposedly ran about three times better than usual.

Not exactly the optimistic fivefold improvement yet, but the prototype did prove that the outfit is on the right track.

The rest of the demo consisted of an Android tablet “browsing the Web, running games and streaming amazing video.”

“This wasn’t your average amazing video. It was 1440p video content running on a 2560×1600 panel,” pointed out Mochel Rayfield on NVIDIA's blog.

“That will enable mobile devices to output to the highest resolution monitors or tablets equipped with a 10.1-inch display with 300 DPI.”

Project Kal-El should yield working models in August, meaning that super phones and quad-core tablets may very well be released this year.