More information about Kal-El chipset, five cores not four?

With Kal-El tablets nearing release later this year and phones coming in early 2012, nVidia has released a couple of new whitepapers with more information about the Kal-El chipset. One interesting fact from the paper notes that Kal-El isn't really quad-core but instead actually has a total of five cores.

Dubbed the Companion Core, this fifth core will be used to significantly decrease the power used by the Kal-El chipset versus that of the Tegra 2 dual-core chipset. This comes along with a new process they have developed called the variable Symmetric Multiprocessing or vSMP for short. For you readers out there who love whitepapers, we suggest heading over to the nVidia blog to read the new ones regarding Kal-El for all the gritty details about vSMP.

In non-technical terms though, essentially this fifth companion core will be utilized for low power operations such as when your phone is just idling. That way instead of all the cores running while your device is idling, it will take advantage of this companion core instead to run while it's idling which in turn will save on power consumption. When you fire up something with needs more power the companion core powers down and the quad-core fires up to handle it.

Inside Kal-El there is also a new 12-core GPU which will easily handle every Android game you throw at it as it will be 3x faster than Tegra 2. We are already seeing console-quality games starting to land on Android and with quad-core devices coming soon we are only going to see a lot more making their way to the Android platform. You can check out both whitepapers over on nVidia's website with the first whitepaper detailing about the new companion chip while the second whitepaper goes into the benefits of this new quad-core chipset.

Developer Website: nVidia