NVIDIA announces quad-core Kal-El SOC, promises it in tablets by August (video)

So it turns out that NVIDIA roadmap we saw last month was as true and pure as driven snow. The barely conceivable quad-core
Tegra chip that it listed has now been made official by none other than
NVIDIA itself, with the company also informing us that the new silicon
is already sampling out to prospective clients. Known as Kal-El
internally, this will most likely turn into NVIDIA's Tegra 3 as and when
it's ready to enter the consumer market. Tonight NVIDIA whetted our
appetite for what's to come with a demo that can most fittingly be
described as an exhibition of unadulterated computational muscle. A 2560
x 1440 stream was being decoded on a developmental device, scaled down
to that slate's native 1366 x 768 resolution, and additionally displayed
on a connected 30-inch, 2560 x 1600 monitor. That entire voluminous
workload was being handled in real time by Kal-El and we saw no signs of
it struggling.

By NVIDIA's own estimation, the quad-core newbie provides roughly double the processing power of Tegra 2 and triple the graphics-crunching prowess. In the second demonstration of the evening, we saw an instance of Great Battles Medieval
-- ran at 720p with 650 enemy soldiers on the field -- on both a Tegra 2
and a Kal-El platform, which showed the baby superhero handily dusting
its still very new brethren. This was in large part down to the full
dozen GPU cores contained within Kal-El, though before you freak out
about battery-draining insanity, NVIDIA claims things are much, much
more efficient as well -- up to 12 hours of HD video playback are
promised under the right circumstances.

It's a big fat wedge of awesome boasts we've heard from the GeForce
maker today, however the company's given us a schedule to hold it to as
well. The "August timeframe" is when the quad-core Kal-El is expected to
land in tablets, while smartphones will have to wait until the holiday
season to benefit from what's likely to be a slightly downgraded
variant. Skip past the break to eye the future Tegra roadmap for the
next few years plus video of the wildly impressive demos we were witness
to.

NVIDIA Kal-El quad-core SOC and development platform