NVIDIA Kal-El papers reveals fifth 'companion' core, more
updated 01:40 pm EDT, Tue September 20, 2011
NVIDIA releases 2 Kal-El mobile chip whitepapers
NVIDIA has just detailed more information and released a couple of white papers on its upcoming Kal-El mobile chip. The new revelation is that the quad-core chip will actually use five cores, with the so-called "companion" core being another ARM Cortex-A9. It will perform more mundane tasks such as web browsing, listening to music, or running live wallpapers. This core operates at 500MHz for higher per-watt efficiency.
The operation of this core and the others is called Variable SMP architecture and it is said to be OS transparent, eliminating the need to customize apps and systems to take advantage of it.
The other white paper is dedicated to showing off how the quad-core chip uses less power than dual-core processors no matter what the required level of performance.
The company also revealed that the chip will sport a new 12-core GPU with up to three times the graphics performance of the Tegra 2 chip, but more details on this will be released later.
