MWC: NVIDIA's quad-core Kal-El chipset promises mobile muscle

by Steven Mostyn - Feb 16 2011, 11:25

With the Mobile World Congress (MWC) tradeshow in full swing over in Barcelona, the ‘my tech is bigger than your tech’ posturing between prominent chipmakers continues today as NVIDIA rolls out its new Kal-El mobile processing platform.

The Kal-El chipset, which was demonstrated at the show via a partitioned tablet device, is described by NVIDIA as the industry’s very first quad-core system-on-a-chip (SoC) and should be powering similar mobile devices by the end of the summer.

“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,” beamed Phil Carmack, senior vice president of NVIDIA’s mobile business, in a PCWorld report.

Further to that, Carmack said Kal-El will enable OEMs to produce a 10-inch tablet capable of carrying a retina display—which will reduce eye strain—while the chipset’s power consumption should be less than that of the Tegra 2.

Drawing on its considerable experience in the graphics field, NVIDIA has bolstered the performance of its quad-core platform by including a total of 12 GeForce cores, which no doubt played a part in helping the demo tablet run a real-time strategy videogame ported from Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

Samples of Kal-El are already shipping to device makers and NVIDIA expects the chipset to be powering tablets by August, and smartphones by the end of 2011.

The emergence of Kal-El comes after Qualcomm pushed its new 2.5GHz Snapdragon mobile platform into the MWC spotlight earlier this week.

According to Qualcomm, its quad-core Snapdragon (APQ8064) should be ready for use within next-generation tablets and smartphones during the first quarter of 2012. 

And no, the Superman reference didn’t go unnoticed over here at Tech Herald towers, we just couldn’t be bothered working a cheap ‘man of steel’ gag into the story.

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