Nvidia Shows Quad-Core ARM Tablet UPDATE

Nvidia shall, after huge: Even in late summer to provide a preliminary Tablets with the quad-core ARM combi processor " Kal-El to be, have, of about five times faster is reputed as the currently available Tegra 2 (Tegra 250). 2012, a Kal-El's successor, code-named Wayne appear, in turn, provides the double performance. 2013 Nvidia plans then "Logan" and 2014 "Strong" and promises to last approximately 75 times the performance available since late summer of 2010 Tegra 2

Nvidia led the MWC a working Android-Tablet with Kal-El on before. Tegra 3 it was marketing director Nick Stam not call the technical. It was not yet decided what name the processor in the market would come under.

The demo Tablet counted in the show a video in the resolution 2560 × 1440 down to its native resolution and gave it out simultaneously on a monitor connected via HMDI full resolution. Another demo showed a complex game, were simultaneously shown on the attached monitor websites - apparently without any lag.

An approximately fivefold acceleration Nvidia promises to the currently available Tegra 2 On board next to the four cores or a graphic unit with 12 cores, which will have about three times the graphics performance of the ULP GeForce Tegra 2 - twice the processing power and three times the graphics performance, Nvidia added to five times the overall performance. The battery power is to keep each of the predecessor within limits: Nvidia promises very effectively deal with the available charge.

According to Nvidia's first tablet with the quad-core processor such as in August on the market. Kal-El smartphones Nvidia expected until year end - this may get a slightly slimmed down version.

The site Anandtech.com has learned that Kal-El in nanometer technology made 40 is still and ARM SoCs huge for silicon area about 80 square millimeters evidence - more than, say, the AMD E-350 (Zacate), who at 75 square millimeters of two CPU cores, 80 DirectX 11 Shader and a video accelerator underneath. The AMD CPU however still needs a chipset, while ARM SoCs the Tegra and I / O units (SATA, USB, PCIe) stuck like.

Nvidia compares the CPU performance of Kal-El on the basis of the benchmark core mark (11 352 points) not only with the Tegra 2 (1 GHz, 2 × ARM Cortex-A9, 5840 points), but also with the four years old x86 Processor Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 (2 cores, 2 GHz, 10 136 points). Accordingly, therefore, would be Kal-El faster than the 2-GHz mobile processor.

However, while Nvidia's Android code for Kal-El with the GCC 4.4.1 and has produced many improvements mark the core (-O3-mcpu = cortex-a8-funroll-loops-falign-loops = 8-fgcse-sm-fno- tree-vectorize-MARM / heap / 4: Pthreads), allowed to the Core 2 Duo only an older compiler (GCC 3.4.4 (cygming special, gdc 0:12 using dmd 0.125)-O2-DPERFORMANCE_RUN = 1-lrt / 2: Pthreads ).

With more optimized code trumps but in the c't laboratory even one atom of D525 (2 cores / 1.8 GHz), the Kal-El with 11 311 points mark-core (4.4.4-10 GCC-O3-DMULTITHREAD = 8-DUSE_PTHREAD - lrt / heap / 8: Pthreads). In the comparisons with core marketing is also considered that there is a multi-threaded benchmark is - the performance potential of future multi-core ARM's can only use words with carefully tuned software.