Kal-El Seen by Analysts as Nvidia's Fortune Maker
Nvidia's Kal-El processor is creating quite some buzz in the industry and it seems that there are now analysts jumping on the train and are evaluating the chip's opportunity.
A report published in Forbes now suggests that the idea for a fifth core could be translating into about $3.5 to $4 billion for Nvidia - in stock gains alone.
Based on the idea that a fifth companion core that would run background processes at a very low power consumption value when an Android phone is basically in sleep mode, analysts are making the assumption that Nvidia's stock could climb by about 35 percent to $20 and give the company a market capitalization of more than $12 billion. The report suggests that Kal-El could help Android devices run "better" and therefore attract customers.
Dealing with background process power consumption has turned into the holy grail on the road to mobile devices with greater battery running times. The problem is that simply checking for incoming messages keeps many hardware alive, including the CPU, the graphics processor as well as wireless components.
It is unclear how much Kal-El will be able to reduce standby power consumption in an everyday scenario, but it is our impression that it may not be enough and just part of a much more complex solution. For example, there has been an approach to scale Wi-Fi connections, which could improve battery life by 50 percent.
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Douglas Perry was a freelance writer for Tom's Hardware covering semiconductors, storage technology, quantum computing, and processor power delivery. He has authored several books and is currently an editor for The Oregonian/OregonLive.
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jblack And not Kal-El, I'm talking about a low-power core that uses almost no power. The CPU would then be able to dynamically turn off and on the "main" cores as needed.Reply -
rylan I bought some NVDA in April for my IRA. Not that a short term gain like this matters for my IRA, but innovation like this is good in the long run.Reply -
chomlee amdwilliam1985lol, time to buy their stock?Reply
Still a good time to buy. Techs have been down in the last couple of weeks. AMD certainly took a dive today which could also be a good time to buy as well (since they are down). Another reason to buy is that the general public has not caught on to android tablets yet thinking that the IPAD is the only good tablet out there. Personally, I have both the IPAD 2 and the Acer tablet with the tegra 2 processor. Needless to say, I like the Android tablet better.
Anyhow, hopefully Kal-El will help android sink into the tablet market and really help Nvidias stock price. -
JamesSneed Sounds good on paper but then so does Bulldozer. Of course on both Kal-El and Bulldozer we really won't know until they are out. I'm going to have to miss out on the NVDA stock because I'm not all that confident they will get that kind of market share. Sure wont be mad if I'm wrong but I'm highly skeptical.Reply -
I don't foresee this happening with multiple x86 cores, since bringing it down to one wouldn't give that huge of a boost. Don't they do something similar with clock stepping?Reply
Instead, this could be a progression of Windows 8's support for ARM processors. Use an arm core to run low-end kernel-level services, and wake up the CPU when you run applications that either demand the horsepower or an incompatible with the ARM architecture.