NVIDIA rocked Barcelona with a demo of their upcoming quad-core Tegra CPU, project KAL-EL at Mobile World Congress. It's all part of their roadmap which promises 75 times the performance of the current Tegra 2 by 2014. Yes, you read that right -- 75 times the performance. Back to the here and now, the KAL-EL, demoed on an prototype Android tablet had five times the raw performance of the current Tegra 2, rendering full screen video at 1440p running on a 2560×1600 display.
With it's 12 core GeForce GPU, this thing is going to be insane. Partners have the chip in hand, and we're to expect devices, tablets naturally, using this gear by Aug 2011. NVIDIA has more to say tomorrow, we'll be sure to stay on top of this one. [NVIDIA]
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Looks like Nvidia and Qualcomm are trying to have a race
It's not a race at all. Nvidia is way ahead of Qualcomm. Qualcomm doesn't even have their dual core chips out in anything yet and they aren't supposed to have quad core til late 2012. Everyone besides Nvidia needs to step it up or get left in the dust.
I can assure you the Exynos is going to destroy tegra 2, I know that Samsung has some nice stuff planned for quad core, but right now, we won't need quad core. Besides, I don't think it's the first mobile quad core processor, doesn't the NGP have a quad core processor? ain't that portable?
Please tell us how you can assure this cause you are so wrong
Flipping that one around on its head, how can you be sure he is so wrong? Tech presentations are next to meaningless compared to finished products.
Assertions that one side is going to destroy the other are virtually meaningless at this stage. We don't have either hardware in hand or even side-by-side for confirmation, nor do we have any indicators about how many vendors are planning to use what chip.
Early reports on early samsung hardware has it slightly slower than T2. Take that for what it's worth. I don't think we can say for sure either way.
Nah. Qualcomm is by far the worst in the industry. Nvidia has always been ahead of qualcomm.
Great to see all these soc manufacturers try to top themselves, awesome for phone innovation. Seems like nvidia is the only one willing to back up their claims with a 2011 release. It will be out of this world if they get this out by this Aug. At this rate we'll be upgrading our tech toys every 3 months.
TI vs Nvidia vs Qualcomm vs Exynos: Round 1 FIGHT!!!
Wtf is 1440p?
That would be 1440 progressive lines of glorious resolution. You guessed it! That would be MORE than your HD TV. Can you say WOW?
No, but my battery can, in a long agonizing 4 minutes, just screaming WOOOOW, and I sure as hell can, when I have to charge it with 4 hours of stand by.
This is impressive, but I don't think even a 5,000 MAH battery would do it justice for a mobile tablet.
Aim sticking with my n1 until the next big thing. Piss on Atrix
Same here.
And a 1 minute battery life!
Lol :D no just a 7000 maH battery :P
Nah, that'll just stall for another good 2 minutes, before the device explodes. These things will need bricks to charge em.
Just a battery the size of a current car battery is all it will require.
Whilst I'm rather concerned about battery life and am skeptical about the value of quad-cores compared to a phone that can last a good day or so without recharging, the ARM architecture is really good. Its standby power usage is incredibly low, and its why the architecture is seen so heavily used in the mobile market. x86 is just a power hungry and over complex architecture. Intel has been touting their next generation mobile chip at MWC and the main thing they've had to resort to is talking about active power usage being lower than rivals, which is certainly something great but ultimately pointless if standby is even slightly above that of ARM.
You mean like the dual core Tegra 2's that are getting similar or better batter life as single core phones?
Besides, you can stick a much bigger battery in a tablet.
I may cry or crap myself. My contract with Big Red is up for renewal in August and I'd LOVE to see one of these chips in my new toy (phone or tablet...who knows).
Lots of cores is nice and all, but what about power consumption?
Exactly, when will the battery companies make the batteries stronger without making them bigger? I understand dual core improves battery efficiency but why not make a stronger, longer lasting battery?
wow! 12 cores?!?! 8-O
Named after Supes and has a woman holding a gun?
My thought exactly.
Yeah, apparently the nerds in development who actually know who "Kal-El" is didn't pass that along to the frat kids in marketing. That, or they couldn't get the (expensive) rights to use Superman imagery but decided maybe no one would notice they obviously used his name.
This is getting crazy with how fast things r coming out
No sense having a quad-core chip if the software/os does not utilize it.
Unless you're going for bragging rights, otherwise it's useless.
This is Linux, so of course *it* can use all the cores. But the end applications would have to be threaded to be of any real use with more than one core. Threading a single user, single application can be challenging... depending on what the app does.
haha some of these exploding/batterylife comments made me chuckle but realistically this will probs give your phone better battery life than it has now with whatever its running, one thing these companies especially nvidia are being sure of doing is increasing efficiency above all things other wise these things would not be mobile solutions and theyd be blown out by their competitors, though i gotta admit 12 cores sure does scream battery killer haha :D
So then I wouldn't even consider a tablet until this Quad Core CPU is on the market. I can wait for Quad core. Can you imagine what that would be like in a phone?
I'm not remotely worried about battery life on this and I will tell you why. There are no screens that can do 2560×1600 at around 10". At least none that will be in a tablet without it costing a metric **** ton of money. The point of this demo was to do two fold.
Beat their chest like King Kong being circled by Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung.
and
To show that this device can be easily docked and be used for external entertainment. So a dock to that pretty new HDTV anyone where battery life isn't an issue?
Docks fair enough but I would personally love to see this beast in my TV. Imagine, games on demand without a console.
NVIDIA is killing it.....this is one of those stories that I wish I wouldn't be a tech savvy person and reading this because it makes me not want to buy a tablet or phone until this thing is out. I guess that's a tech persons dilemma, if you wait, your always waiting because new cooler shit is always around the corner. It just seems like before NVIDIA, a company hasn't revealed so much ahead of time. I guess since they come from the pc graphics card world, that's how they run their business, and probably they didn't want any other CPU mfg to get attention.