Kal-El is not just the real name of Super Man, it is also the code name of NVIDIA’s next generation mobile Tegra processor. With four Cortex-A9 CPU cores and one powerful GeForce GPU with 12 cores the ARM based circuit will be found in tablets this fall. NVIDIA has shown how it has ported the DX11 game Lost Planet 2 to Android and powers it with Kal-El.
NVIDIA have already shown the graphics performance of Kal-El through the tech demo Glowball, but it has now shown that it has more solutions to show for its first Kal-El prototype.
In a 10″ tablet with 1280 x 800 pixel resolution NVIDIA has installed an early version of its quad-core system processor and in just a few month it managed to port the demanding PC game Lost Planet 2 to Android and the new Tegra platform. in a video demonstration for Engadget.com NVIDIA showed a film sequence from the game where it rendered the graphics in realtime, although not in perfect frame rates for a PC game. As exected there are not DirectX 11 effects since they are exclusive to Microsoft Windows, but the image quality we are about to get in our tablets certainly is impressive.
| Specification | Kal-El (Tegra 3) | Tegra 2 |
| Process |
40nm | 40nm |
| Size | 80mm2 | 49mm2 |
| CPU | Fyrkärnig Cortex-A9 vid 1,5 GHz | Tvåkärnig Cortex-A9 vid 1,0 GHz |
| L2 cache | 1MB shared | 1MB shared |
| NEON FPU | Ja | No |
| GPU | GeForce ULP Gen 2 with 12 cores | GeForce ULP with 8 cores |
It also showed a game like graphics demo that was developed with EPIC’s Unreal Engine engine, also very impressive. NVIDIA says that the GeForce related GPU doesn’t need much time to port PC games to the new Kal-El platform, which may open doors for a wider assortment of games in the Tegra Zone.
