NVIDIA's Quad-Core Kal-El Packs a Fifth Core

From DailyTech: The prospect of quad-core or higher smartphones excites many, but it also evokes fear. Many already suffering from somewhat poor battery life so imagine such high core-count designs as being Shiva incarnate for smartphone batteries, a destroyer of your pleasant smartphone world.

But such fears may yet prove unfounded, as many manufacturers are cooking up unique solutions to having a high core count, while keeping a relatively lean power budget.

NVIDIA Corp., makers of the Tegra series of ARM system-on-a-chip (SoC) CPU/GPU designs today unveiled the secret of its plans to make its upcoming Kal-El quad-core SoC more power efficient. The secret is basically this -- NVIDIA's quad-core chip is really a penta-core.

Yes, Tegra 3 has a low-power fifth "companion" core that's essentially the kind of modest ARM design that power the superb power efficiency of devices like the original iPhone.

During less power-hungry tasks like web reading, music playback and video playback, Kal-El completely powers down its four performance-tuned cores and instead uses its fifth companion core. For higher performance tasks, Kal-El disables its companion core and turns on its four performance cores, one at a time, as the work load increases.

NVIDIA has published two white papers on the technology and related Kal-El developments.

The incremental approach to enabling the cores means that Kal-El chips, which will likely be clocked up to 1.5 GHz and may deliver as good or better battery life as current models (providing you aren't doing video encoding and playing 3D games all day). In fact, NVIDIA says Kal-El delivers better battery life than its current generation Tegra 2 (dual-core) chips. In benchmarks, the new chips were also shown posting almost twice the benchmark score of rival Qualcomm Inc.'s MSM8660 dual-core SoC and Texas Instruments Inc.'s OMAP4 (1 GHz) processor.

View: Article @ Source Site