Meet Kal-El, Nvidia's Quad-Core Mobile Processor
Who needs a desktop when you have Superman and Iron Man under the hood of your tablet and smartphone?
Tuesday during Mobile World Congress 2011, Nvidia revealed Project Kal-El, the company's next-generation Tegra system-on-a-chip (SoC) featuring a four-core processor and an additional 12-core GeForce GPU.
"Just as the world has rallied around the concept of dual core, the world is about to see that quad core raises the bar, delivers a lot more performance, and fits into all mobile platforms," Nvidia's senior vice president of the mobile business unit Phil Carmack said at the event.
As demonstrated at the show, the chip is capable of running 1440p video content on a 2560 x 1600 panel. It also has enough horsepower to generate a Retina display-like 300 DPI image on a 10-inch tablet. That said, Kal-El's overall power consumption won't be greater than Tegra 2-- meaning it won't require the sun's yellow rays to power mobile devices.
To demonstrate Kal-El's super strength, Nvidia used Coremark 1.0 as a benchmark to compare the new chip against Tegra 2 and a 2 GHz dual-core Core 2 Duo T7200 processor. Kal-El scored significantly higher than the current Tegra 2 chip, achieving 11,352 and 5,840 respectively. The upcoming chip even surpassed the Core 2 Duo T7200 processor which ranked second on the list at 10,136.
Nvidia also revealed its Tegra roadmap for the next three years during the presentation, backing up the company's previous vow to release a new Tegra chip every year. The roadmap also revealed that someone at the GPU giant is really into comic books.
According to the roadmap, Nvidia is expected to launch Wayne in 2012. This will be followed by Logan in 2013 and Stark in 2014. Wayne will perform 10 times faster than the current Tegra 2 chip whereas Stark is slated to perform even greater at 100 times that of the Tegra 2 in three years.
Additionally, if you didn't get the super hero reference, the four Tegra processors are named after Superman (Kal-El), Batman (Bruce Wayne), Wolverine (James Howlett aka Logan) and Iron Man (Tony Stark).
"You might well ask, What on earth can be done with nearly 75x improvement in performance over Tegra 2 that Stark will provide in 2014?" said Nvidia's Michael Rayfield in a company blog. "Our customers and partners have already indicated that they’re confident they can use everything we give them."
Samples of Nvidia's Kal-El Tegra chip are already out in the field. The final Kal-El processor should start appearing in tablets in August followed by smartphones this holiday season.
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Wasn't there a story here on Toms's about a year back about a report from an industry analyst group predicting that quad-core processors would be seen in smart phones by 2013 and dual core would arrive later this year? Here we are in 2011 and we already have dual core smart phone processors being released and quad cores late this year and early next year. Just think about how these processors stack up against the high power CPUs we were putting in our gaming rigs just 5 years ago. It's pretty amazing the rate at which technology advances.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but whatever happened to true quadcore laptop processors? As far as I know there are no official 4-core mobile processors for laptops, yet Nvidia has already done a lot of work on this quad-core phone processor.
I wonder why they are jumping back and forth from DC to Marvel in the naming scheme?
There are quad-core laptop CPUs, Intel released quad-core laptop CPUs back in 2009 and with the Sandy Bridge CPU launch 3-4 more quad-core laptop CPUs were released. AMD also has quad-core CPUs available.
Don't forget Jor-El, Superman loves that guy! ;-)
I'll be waiting for Tegra 7 "Chuck Norris".
Tegra 7 "Chuck Norris" It can calculate PI to infinitie and still kill you with it's eyebrow.
I think i just jizzed myself
I'll be waiting for Tegra 7 "Chuck Norris".
+1 heheheh
I'd like to hear more about the 12-core geforce gpu
Nvidia is awesome at boasting their stuff to epic proportions even if 2 other companies had it a year ago. Pros: Hype, Cons: delivery is meh
Come son of Jor-El, kneel before Zod!
I'll wait till the bring out the one titled "The Flash", well cuz we all know thats going to be the fastest of them all
Just think about how these processors stack up against the high power CPUs we were putting in our gaming rigs just 5 years ago.
They don't stack up very well, actually.
The CPU cores in all Tegra processors, including the upcoming Kal-El chip, are ARM cores; specifically, ARM-Cortex A9. While great for battery life in mobile devices... They don't exactly stack up to even the Intel Atom when it comes to media/gaming-related tasks, let alone desktop CPUs. All those benchmarks floating around showing favorable numbers for ARM chips all revolve around stuff like basic HTML rendering; stuff that's what you'll be doing on smartphones, but hardly what you're doing on a gaming rig.
I wonder why they are jumping back and forth from DC to Marvel in the naming scheme?
This is a head-scratcher for me as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superboy_%28Kal-El%29
Kal-El very appropriate name, superman in disguise, but an evil egomaniac religious wing nut with glowing hands of death on buck rogers!
the 2 faces of nvidia finally brought forth as one!
I wonder why they are jumping back and forth from DC to Marvel in the naming scheme?
Not sure but I hope they don't get into any legal troubles. I am pretty sure Kal-El is copyrighted by DC.
I don't think the demo is that great. Comparing a dual core to a quad core. I would hope that the quad core would do better in apps that are probably aimed at the arch its on.
I wonder what the battery life is going to be.....
What amazes me is that A0 silicon was demonstrated live, and fully functioning samples are already out in the field. To see this kind of fast pace generational cycling and deployment from an SOC developer is very impressive, and somewhat unheard of. Qualcomm recently announced its next gen dual core ARM-based SOC the MSM8960 will be sampling in Q2, with product availability in early 2012, while its quad core derivative the APQ8064 won't even be sampling until early 2012. This reminds me of the strategy Nvidia used to out compete 3dfx back in the 90's.
Besides the demo this early on, what impresses me the most about Kal-El is its video decode capabilities, and the fact that its processing performance is similar to a low end Core 2 Duo. 50Mbps 1440p h.264 decode, streamed to two displays simultaneously, one of them being a 30" desktop monitor, which means Blu-ray quality HD content is now possible. The big unknown is power consumption and battery life, but if Nvidia is to be believed then given similar workloads it should fit into the same power envelope as the Tegra 2. Given the relative success of the Tegra 2, along with its good battery life, I think I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Anandtech recently published a pretty detailed article about Kal-El if anyones interested...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4181 [...] -this-year
It looks like the smart phone SOC will be the new battle ground of the tech industry in the coming decade, probably going to see a lot of rapid revisions and exponential increases in performance very soon. Hopefully they remember to keep battery life as a top priority as well.
Okay Nvidia was right when they said mobile phones were the future.
Holy crap dude
The compiler for the two Tegra score is GCC 4.4.1, but the compiler for the intel CPU is 3.4.4. And the optimization options for Tegra seems more aggrisive. I guess the compare is sort of misleading.
Not the biggest NVidia fan, but this is exciting.
Wasn't there a story here on Toms's about a year back about a report from an industry analyst group predicting that quad-core processors would be seen in smart phones by 2013 and dual core would arrive later this year? Here we are in 2011 and we already have dual core smart phone processors being released and quad cores late this year and early next year. Just think about how these processors stack up against the high power CPUs we were putting in our gaming rigs just 5 years ago. It's pretty amazing the rate at which technology advances.
All laptops release in the past that had a Core 2 Quad have 4 cores, almost all laptops that have an i7 have 4 cores, also there are laptops with AMD CPUs that have also 4 cores.
Please get into the desktop market as well..We are tired of this monopoly.
Damn some smart phones are getting powerful, I think I'll wait a year or two before getting one. Mobile phones as or more powerful than consoles soon?
about the last video, just because the benchmark uses all 4 cores, doesn't mean real world applications will. as is the case today 90% of programs on the desktop cannot use more than 2 cores. i can only imagine how little multithreading is implemented on mobile devices where they've only gotten dual core processors in the last couple of years.
Okay, maybe not blowing our desktops out of the water right now, but give it a few years. Smartphones running 1 GHz single core ARM processors were about 7 years later than their x86 counterparts. We now have quad core ARM processors being released this year, and they stack up solid against low-end processors from a few years ago. If nVidia is telling the truth and is accurate about Wayne, Logan, and Stark, it absolutely blows Moore's law out of the water. We are talking about an exponent of ten increase every year, 2 at most. Let's consider x86 architecture. Core i 45 nm was released in late 08, and now in early 2011 we have Sandy Bridge. So, about 2 years difference. One thing I can tell you is that my i7-2600k, even overclocked, does not perform anywhere close to 10 times better than an i7-920. If ARM processors can pump out tenfold increases every year, year and a half, ARM will more than likely overtake typical core i7 Nehalem processors in 3 years max, Sandy Bridge not long after that.
But, do take into consideration that in probably 6 or 7 years, silicon based processors will have reached their smallest manufacturing process. I think, correct me if I am wrong, but isn't ARM at 28 nm? If so, it'll hit alternate processing techniques about the same time as Intel probably does, or sooner. Pretty sweet, these SOC's.
breathesrain 02/17/2011 12:21 PM
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Maybe this is a stupid question, but whatever happened to true quadcore laptop processors? As far as I know there are no official 4-core mobile processors for laptops, yet Nvidia has already done a lot of work on this quad-core phone processor.
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wha? Yes, yes it is a stupid question...
NVidia's gradual diversification from their traditional market is evident here. I'm also happy for NVidia for not quitting when Tegra didn't exactly take off.
I