A couple weeks after Nvidia unveiled Tegra 2 to oohs and ahhs at CES, a leaked roadmap slide hinted that Tegra 2’s quad-core successor could show up in devices as early as Fall 2011. Apparently that slide was dead on--Nvidia formally announced the world's first quad-core mobile processor is currently sampling to device makers and is scheduled for production in August. The quad-core processor, codename Kal-El (aka Superman) offers five times the performance of Tegra 2 with twice as many cores, but that performance bump pales in comparison to what Nvidia has planned for 2012 and beyond.
With a trio of superhero codenames attached to its mobile processors, Nvidia is clearly setting its sights on greatness--the company plans to release a new chip on a yearly schedule from 2012-2014. Kal-El will show up at the end of 2011, while Wayne is scheduled for 2012 with a 10 times performance increase over Tegra 2. From there, the improvements only get more insane: Logan is projected to be about 50 times more powerful, while Stark will offer something like 75 Tegra 2’s performance.
Kal-El includes a 12 core GPU, up from the 8 cores in Tegra 2. That number will likely skyrocket with 2012’s Wayne if it's going to improve over Kal-El by a factor of ten. Kal-El is already powerful enough to run 1440p video and output it to a 2560x1600 panel. In the web browsing and CPU benchmarks shown below, Kal-El delivers twice the performance on CPU performance alone--which makes sense, since it has four cores to Tegra 2’s two. Kal-El actually outperforms a Core 2 Duo processor clocked around 2GHz.
Once you start thinking about what phones will be able to do with that processing muscle and Nvidia’s GPU power, things get downright silly. Nvidia says its customers claim they can use all that power, which is fine and dandy. We’re just scared to ask how much these cost to make.
http://www.tested.com/news/nvidia-reveals-tegra-2s-powerful-successors-in-waiting/1841/
While Nvidia have promised impressive performance only to end up with an over priced power hungry product line after many delays with low yields with past iterations of Tegra. The idea of a mobile device capable of running circles around an xbox 360 in 3 years sounds mighty cool to me. And hopefully now they have a few generations of chips under their belt they can deliver on their promises this time.
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