Nvidia Wants Kal-El+ to Be Used in Notebooks

Nvidia has high hopes for its Kal-El+ system-on-a-chip that is supposed to improve on the specs of the first iteration of Kal-El, since it expects the SoCs to be used not only in tablet computers, but also in entry-level notebooks.

This way, Nvidia hopes that it will be able to capitalize on the launch of Windows 8 and its newly found support for the ARM architecture.

For now, details about Kal-El+ are rather scarce as the company's CEO, Jen-Hsung Huang, just announced it the past week at the Citi Technology Conference without providing any information regarding its specifications.

However, from the code-name employed by Nvidia for the SoC one could say that it will be just a slightly enhanced version of the original Kal-El, meaning that it won't bring anything more impressive than a CPU speed bump or a slight graphics power increase.

Whatever the final specs of Kal-El+ may end up being, the Santa Clara company seems determined to get it into entry-level notebooks, as the Tegra Roadmap displayed at CTC reveals.

Nvidia has unveiled the Kal-El system-on-a-chip in February of this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain and is supposed to make its way into tablets until the end of this year.

The chip, will be the first ARM-based tablet processor to feature a quad-core design and will be based on the ARM Cortex A9 architecture.

The four computing cores are expected to be clocked at 1.5GHz and are paired with a GPU containing 12 graphics cores with support for 3D video.

According to Nvidia, this configuration will be able to provide up to five times the speed of the dual-core Tegra 2 SoC, making Kal-El one of the fastest ARM-based chips around, while consuming the same amount of power as its predecessor.

According to the roadmap provided by Nvidia, Kal-El+ should get launched in mid-2012, but we don't know yet when the first devices built around this SoC will actually make it to market. (via ComputerBase)

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