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Nvidia Demos 'Kal-El' Quad-Core Tegra Mobile CPU

Posted by timothy on from the superman-approved dept.

MojoKid writes "Nvidia just took the wraps off their first quad-core Tegra mobile processor design at the Mobile World Conference today and it's a sight to behold. Dubbed Kal-El, the new chip will be capable of outputting 1440P video content and offer 300 DPI on devices with a 10.1" display. Nvidia is claiming that Kal-El will deliver 5x the performance of Tegra 2 and ship with a 12-core GeForce GPU as well. The company has also posted two different videos of Kal-El in action."

14 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Kneel before who, now? by Tumbleweed · · Score: 2

    So performance similar to a Core 2 Duo (T72000) in a phone? Sa-weet! Gimme a dock so I can plug my 'phone' into and use my monitor/mouse/keyboard/internet connection, and that's all the computer I'll need for most purposes. I'll figure up the big boy when I need to use Photoshop or other intensive things.

    1. Re:Kneel before who, now? by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You mean something like this?
      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-10/meet-motorola-s-mighty-morphin-laptop-phone-duo-tech-by-rich-jaroslovsky.html

      --
      You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
  2. Re:1440p? by chenjeru · · Score: 2, Insightful

    1440 is a version of 1080p. It still has 1080 lines of horizontal resolution, but only 1440 vertical lines instead of the standard1920. This format uses non-square pixels to fill a 16x9 aspect.

    --
    Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. - Will Rogers
  3. Re:1440p? by GerbilSoft · · Score: 2, Informative

    1440 is a version of 1080p. It still has 1080 lines of horizontal resolution, but only 1440 vertical lines instead of the standard1920. This format uses non-square pixels to fill a 16x9 aspect.

    This right here is why "HD" is a joke. You've got 1366x768 "720p" displays that are only capable of showing 1280x720 signals, and now there's "1440p" displays that are non-square 1440x1080 instead of the expected 2560x1440. Either that or you're mistaken, since the slides in TFA mention 2560x1600.

  4. Re:1440p? by beelsebob · · Score: 3, Informative

    not true. 1440p, as with 720p and 1080p refers to the number of rows. 1440p would be 1920 pixels wide at 4:3 or 2560 pixels wide at 16:9.

  5. power consumption? by crunzh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They write nothing about power consumption... I am disappointed. The most important benchmark of a mobile CPU is power consumption, I can stick a atom in a cellphone to get a lot of cpu power, but the batteries will be toast in no time.

    --
    Visit http://www.crunzh.com/ for free software. Mac/Lin/Win
    1. Re:power consumption? by Khyber · · Score: 2

      "It's possible they simply have no good power consumption numbers yet."

      Sorry, even my company has the brains to hook the equipment up to a kill-a-watt during the various testing phases of product development, so we have power figures available immediately for given loads.

      If nVidia can't cough up $200 in measly American Currency for ONE KAW tester, then nVidia is bound to be going the way of the dinosaur.

      Oh, wait, they've already begun emulating 3dfx, by selling their own cards. We all saw how well that worked for Elpin systems.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    2. Re:power consumption? by Guspaz · · Score: 2

      They've had actual silicon for 12 days. They may have been too busy showing it off to the press to sit down and plug it into a killawatt.

      Referencing the Anandtech article, nVidia claims that for the same workload, it is as efficient or more efficient than the Tegra 2, but if you increase the workload, it'll obviously use a bunch more power.

    3. Re:power consumption? by CAIMLAS · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Incorrect. The latest atoms (granted, not readily available for consumption) are fast and lower power than some of the leading ARM smartphone CPU/SoCs (or at least comparable on a perf/watt basis).

      Your biggest power drains in a smartphone will be:

      * Cellular and WiFi radios
      * Display
      * Crap software - poorly implemented drivers for the above, in addition to poorly implemented 3D/etc. drawing mechanisms which ineffectively utilize the processor, draw a lot on the screen, and so on.

      --
      ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
    4. Re:power consumption? by MukiMuki · · Score: 2

      Ummm, no? 9 watts is low for an Atom chip. 5 watts is unheard of, though AMD is planning on something to that effect with Bobcat.

      The dual-core 1ghz Tegra 2 with its embedded graphics core and 720p h.264 video decode (actually 1080p, but 720p support is a LOT more comprehensive) is 2 watts. TWO. And that's from six months ago when Nvidia's design was over power budget. It might be closer to 1 or 1.5 now. That's for the ENTIRE chipset, whereas Atom's motherboard adds another 10-20 watts.

      Even the AMD chip, which has the same video decode and level of embedded graphics probably won't hold up all that well in the 5 watt range, and that's 2-3 times the power consumption.

    5. Re:power consumption? by steveha · · Score: 2

      Mod parent up. A Tegra 2 is a "system on a chip" and you don't need much else. An Atom needs support chips, and you have to look at the total power budget of the Atom plus support chips.

      A Tegra is much more power-efficient than an Atom. It is not an accident that Android 3.0 tablets will be running on Tegra 2 chips, and not on Atom chips.

      steveha

      --
      lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
  6. Re:Their other projects are also superheroes by Lord+Grey · · Score: 2

    Slated for the next four years are ....

    Don't count your weasels before they pop, dink.

    -- The Tick

    --
    // Beyond Here Lie Dragons
  7. slashdot making assumptions again by OrangeTide · · Score: 4, Informative

    Their demonstration showed 2560x1440 content.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  8. Re:This ARM right? by alvinrod · · Score: 2

    If it's anything like the Tegra 2 it's going to be regular Cortex-A9 cores, an Nvidia GPU, and the usual dedicated hardware found on most ARM SoCs. Here's a picture of the Tegra 2 so I imagine that the Tegra 3 will look similar, just with more cores and a beefier GPU.

    However, the Tegra 2 doesn't perform any better than the Exynos from Samsung or TI's newest OMAP based on AnandTech benchmarks, so I don't expect Tegra 3 to be much different from other parts available at the time. Considering Sony has said their next PSP, which is targeted to ship around the holidays, is going to have a 4 C-A9 cores and 4 SGX543 graphics cores, the Tegra 3 probably won't be a runaway performance monster.

    What I'm most excited for are the ARM Cortex-A15 products that should be out next year. Those will allow for much higher clock rates and should make for great netbook performance. Keep the usual SoC dedicated hardware components and battery life will be even more phenomenal.