NVIDIA has taken som nice scalps with the Tegra 2 platform. Not the least Samsung who despite in-house development of ARM processors chose Tegra 2 for several products. During MWC 2011 NVIDIA played its latest trump ; a new quad-core superprocessor dubbed Kal-El that will appear in products in 2011.
Kal-El is as perhaps some of you know the birth name of “Superman” and that is just the first hint from NVIDIA and its views of the new mobile processor platform. The new Kal-El project is in fact Tegra 3, but what makes it extra interesting is that NVIDIA has revealed a lot more details and moved up the launch date quite a bit for its next generation Tegra platform. It has already shown the first functioning Kal-El circuits at Mobile World Congress 2011.
Kal-El will be up to five times as powerful as Tegra 2 and this is much thanks to twice as many Cortex-A9 CPU cores, 2 vs. 4. Each core has been made more efficient with support for NEON through ARM’s own media processor (MPE). The four cores share 1MB L2 cache, same as Tegra 2, but the 32-bit memory controller will support considerably faster LPDDR2 memory. On the whole Kal-El will be as powerful as a dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 CPU if we are to trust NVIDIA’s own tests. A CPU that consumes relatively much at 34 watt.
The application processor will be made with 40nm technology and is quite a lot larger than Tegra 2, 80mm2 vs. ~49mm2, but NVIDIA claims that it has learned a lot over the years and power consumption will not be higher at similar loads.
Besides a more powerful CPU portion NVIDIA has beefed-up the integrated GeForce ULP GPU. The base architecture is the same, but with 12 exeuction units, up from 8 in Tegra 2 – the GPU has a lot more performance to offer even if the clock frequencies would remain at Tegra 2 levels.
NVIDIA claims that Kal-El supports resolutions up to 2560×1600 pixels and it proved it by playing a video at 2560×1440 resolution no two seeprate screens. The video processor in Kal-El will be more powerful than Tegra 2 and capable of everything from 1080p60 to stereoscopic 3D.
The Tegra roadmap is just as impressive. The demonstrations at MWC 2011 were done with ready to ship samples with A0 stepping near full capacity. NVIDIA are very agressive and says that we may see the first tablets with Kal-El in August, while smartphones should appear in Q4. Would NVIDIA keep to its time schedule it will be the first to market with a quad-core Cortex-A9 circuit and put pressure on the competition.
In 3 years NVIDIA promises near 100 fold performance
Source: Anandtech, Engadget
