We’ve known about Kal-El — the quad-core mobile processor from NVIDIA — for a fair period of time , but many of the finer details have remained a secret as we’ve anxiously awaited its debut in tablets and smartphones. Fortunately, we’ve got some reading material to bide our time because the company published white papers discussing benefits of the brand new CPU, and for the foremost part it’s what you’d expect: NVIDIA touts higher performance, better battery life and improved physics-based gaming when more cores are involved and dealing together.
What came as a surprise to us was the undeniable fact that this quad-core CPU actually utilizes five cores: as well as the normal four main Cortex A9 high-performance cores, Kal-El throws in a fifth Cortex A9 “companion” core specifically designed to deal with simpler tasks in effort to reduce power consumption brought on by active standby processes. How is it done? The Companion core’s max operating frequency gets capped at 500MHz, offering higher performance and larger efficiency per watt when running menial tasks equivalent to push email, Twitter / Facebook sync, widgets, background apps and live wallpapers. This leaves the four main cores free to maintain the stuff it does best — games, web browsing, transcoding / editing audio and video, 3D, physics simulations and image processing, to call a number of — allowing performance bumps of as much as 50 percent in comparison to Tegra 2. We are able to tell that quad-core devices are going to make us very, more than happy. If charts and geeky stats enliven your day love it does ours, head to the source to read the papers of their entirety.
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