Nvidia releases the Kal-El quad-core mobile chip

(PhysOrg.com) -- Nvidia has announced their brand new quad-core mobile processor at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The new processor was given the interestingly superheroic name Kal-El. Just in case you did not read a lot of comic books as a kid, this is the name that Superman was given by his parents on his home planet of Krypton.

During a live demonstration at the Mobile World Congress Nvidia showed off the speed that Kal-El can give to web browsing, with speeds that are two times faster than other dual-core processors currently on the market. Of course, you really cannot simply take the companies word for it. A lot of factors can effect the speed of browsing.

It is time for us to bring in an objective measure. When tested, Kal-El received a CoreMark score of 11,352. That score is, as promised, roughly twice the performance rating score of Nvidia's Tegra 2. The Tegra 2 received a CoreMark score of 5,840.

The Kal-El processor is expected to ship in as-yet-unnamed tablets by August of 2011 and be featured in smartphones by Christmas 2011. Though a few lucky customers are already getting samples of the products made with the new Nvidia chip currently. The names of the devices that are sporting these enhanced chips were not released.

As it turns out Kal-El is only the beginning of these super hero themed chips. A whole line of heroic processors are expected to come to the market between now and 2014, with increasing speeds. Future chips will sport names such as Wayne, Logan, and Stark. Stark is expected to be the most advanced of the planned chips in this line with an improvement in performance of up to 75x, when compared to the Tegra 2.

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