NVIDIA Demos Next Generation "Kal-El" Quad-Core Tegra Mobile Processor

NVIDIA took the wraps off its first quad-core Tegra processor design at the Mobile World Conference today and it's a sight to behold. Dubbed Kal-El, the new chip will be capable of outputting 1440P video content and offer 300 DPI on devices with a 10.1" display.


NVIDIA is claiming that Kal-El will deliver 5x the performance of Tegra 2 and ship with a 12-core GeForce GPU as well. NVIDIA has posted two different videos of Kal-El in action. In the first, the future Tegra product is being used to browse the 'net as part of a benchmark called NVBench.  


In the second video below, Team Green uses an industry standard benchmark known as CoreMark to compare the performance of Kal-El, Tegra 2, and an Intel T7200 dual-core Core 2 Duo running at 2GHz with 4MB of L2 cache and a 667MHz FSB.


NVIDIA's plans for future versions of Tegra are ambitious to say the least. By 2014, NV expects to ship its "Stark" SoC, which it claims will offer 75x the performance of Tegra 2.

Not to rain on the company's parade, but we recommend taking the published CoreMark results with a grain of salt. The program, published by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC), is only designed to test the core functions of a processor. According to CoreMark.org: "It is encouraging to see the industry, as well as academia, adapting to a new standard so quickly, but let us not forget – CoreMark only targets core operations. EEMBC’s full-featured application benchmarks are much better suited for testing a processor’s capability in a real application. Furthermore, processors are becoming increasingly complex and one core-based benchmark is insufficient for a comprehensive analysis."

That said, Kal-El still looks pretty sexy.