Our friends over at nVidia have told us that they have coined a new term, or slogan if you will, to describe the Tegra 3 quad-core chipset which is actually five cores in total and not four. The fifth core, which is essentially the power management core, has been referred to using many different terms.
Some terms that the fifth core has been called included the technical description for it being variable symmetric multiprocessing (vSMP) to the companion core, stealth core and our favorite, the ninja core. All of these terms, however, could end up getting confusing since there is no real standard as to what it should be called.
This has led nVidia to coin the term 4-plus-1, meaning four core plus the fifth power management core. From now one that will be how the quad-core chipset will be described by nVidia when talking about the Terga 3 chipset. So when you start hearing this new term, which should be happening a lot when MWC 2012 starts, that is what it is referring to.
We will most likely stick to the term “ninja core” since it just sounds a hell of a lot cooler.
Source: nVidia
