Laptop Thoughts: NVIDIA Kal-El's Five Cores: When Four Cores Are Just Not Enough

"Last week NVIDIA provided an update on its Tegra SoC roadmap. Kal-El, its third generation SoC (likely to launch as Tegra 3) has been delayed by a couple of months. NVIDIA originally expected the first Kal-El tablets would arrive in August, but now it's looking like sometime in Q4."

NVIDIA's Kal-El generation of processors has been delayed, so "Tegra3" tablets are now not expected until sometime in Q4 2011, with subsequent generations pushed back into 2012 and 2013. Concerns have been expressed about Kal-El's power consumption, but this has been well addressed by NVIDIA, by power gating, or the ability to turn off individual cores when not active. The new processor offers five cores, but can have either up to four running for various workloads, or have only the fifth core running, for example when downloading emails in the background with the screen off. Performance gains are expected to be 2-3x with Kal-El, with significant power savings. Pretty amazing stuff!