Items tagged with Kal-El
Asus and Nvidia have collectively taken the wraps off the next-generation version of Asus' well-received Transformer tablet line, and the new system aims to carve out a slice of the premium tablet market. It's far from a sure bet given the tremendous difficulty Android tablets have had cracking into the iPad-dominated industry, but the Prime impresses—at least, so far. We reserve final judgment until we've actually seen shipping hardware. The Asus Transformer Prime, in docked configuration. The Transformer Prime incorporates Nvidia's new Kal-El processor and it's one of Tegra 3's upper-end launch systems. We've discussed Kal-El in depth several times before; the new chip contains a fifth...
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Over the past seven months or so, NVIDIA has revealed a number of details regarding its upcoming mobile wonder-chip, codenamed Kal-El. According to information provided by NVIDIA dating all the way back to February, Kal-El was to be the world’s first mobile quad-core SoC, sporting an integrated 12-core GeForce GPU, with support for resolutions up to 2560x1600, and performance that’s roughly 5x that of the current Tegra 2. News out of NVIDIA today, however, reveals that Kal-El actually has 5 CPU cores, four high-performance cores for general processing duties a low-power “companion” core that’ll only be used for background tasks, active standby, and for...
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Microsoft's Build conference kicks off tomorrow and is expected to present world+dog with our first panoramic view of Windows 8, including details on the OS's embedded virtualization technology (baked into all versions), its improved boot times, native USB 3 support, and a host of other technologies. Several companies will be on-hand to demonstrate Windows 8 tablets and devices as well--including a rumored Samsung tablet that'll be powered by Intel hardware, rather than the ARM-based equipment that's grabbed headlines throughout 2011. Any prototype Samsung devices will likely feature Intel's upcoming 32nm Cedar Trail at the least--it wouldn't surprise us if the company opted to include a more...
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NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, Rob Csongor (Investor Relations), and Karen Burns (Interim CFO) hosted a conference call yesterday to discuss the company’s Q2 earnings for fiscal year 2012. The financial data looks good for NVIDIA, but the always outspoken Jen-Hsun Huang also revealed a few interesting bits of info regarding 28nm production, Kal-El, and Windows 8. On the call, NVIDIA claimed revenue increased 5.7% to $1.02 billion from $962.0 million in the previous quarter. Using GAAP, net income was $151.6 million, or $0.25 per diluted share; non-GAAP net income was $193.5 million, or $0.32 per diluted share. GAAP gross margin increased to 51.7%, a record for the fourth consecutive...
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A few months back, NVIDIA demoed its upcoming quad-core SoC for future tablets and related mobile devices, dubbed Kal-El. At the time, NVIDIA claimed that Kal-El would deliver 5x the performance of current Tegra 2 solutions and ship with a 12-core GeForce GPU as well. And now, NVIDIA is showing off Kal-El again, but this time with an impressive graphics and physics demonstration that really shows off what the chip can do. “Given that dual-core processors are already on market, you might be wondering how Project Kal-El’s quad-core technology will improve the mobile experience. Rather than try to explain it, we’ve put together a hands-on demo to give you a sneak peek at the new...
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Nvidia announced today that it's acquiring the fabless semiconductor design firm Icera. The UK-based company specializes in soft modem chipsets for a variety of devices, including laptops, netbooks, tablets, and smartphones. The two companies have a history of cooperation; Icera announced Tegra-compatible wireless chipsets back in 2009. Nvidia's Phil Carmack writes: "This is a significant step forward in NVIDIA’s strategy to be the processor company for the post-PC era... Icera’s baseband and RF technologies span 2G, 3G and 4G networks... Icera’s programmable baseband processor architecture will allow NVIDIA and its OEM customers to innovate and adapt signaling algorithms in...
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Jon Peddie Research has released its Q1 2011 estimates, and the figures don't favor Nvidia. The research firm tracked strong gains for Intel and AMD (in terms of volume). AMD's total share of the GPU market rose to 24.8 percent, up from 21.5 percent a year ago (a gain of 24.8 percent total). Intel came in at 54.4 percent, 9.7 percent higher than its Q1 2010 total of 49.6 percent. Both companies' gains were at the expense of Team Green—Nvidia's share of the market fell from 28 percent to 20 percent—a significant decline. This loss of share partly reflects NV's decision to exit the integrated chipset market, but it's also an ominous sign of things to come. Sandy Bridge and Llano,...
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When Nvidia announced its next-generation Tegra product at the Mobile World Conference, it pulled out all the stops in an effort to impress. The stats themselves were impressive—the chip packs a twelve-core GeForce GPU in with a quad-core ARM CPU—but NV opted to hammer home the point by showing benchmark results. According to Nvidia, Kal-El turned in a score of 11,352 in the embedded processor benchmark Coremark while a T7200 Core 2 Duo (65nm, 2GHz dual-core, 4MB L2, 667MHz FSB) returned a score of just 10,136. If you want to see Nvidia's original video, you can do so here. We weren't completely sold on the results because, as we explained: The program [Coremark], published by the...
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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...
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