Nvidia announced the project Kal-El at MWC 2011, the successor of the Tegra 2 platform for mobile devices.
Nvidia said that the Kal-El packs a quad-core mobile CPU (A9), a new 12-core nvidia GPU that supports 3D stereo and HD resolutons of up to 2560 x 1600. Nvidia quantifies the move from Tegra 2 to Kal-El as a 5x increase in performance.
NVIDIA also expects Kal-El to be somewhere in the realm of the performance of a Core 2 Duo processor. The company demonstrated results from the CoreMark 1.0 benchmark, which showws that the Kal-El was faster than an Intel Core2Duo (T7200) CPU:
Tablets based on Kal-El will be available starting August 2011, while smartphones will be available this Christmas and into the first half of next year, according to Nvidia.
At the Mobile World Congress (MWC), Nvidia demonstrated the Kal-El platform running in an Android tablet. The comapany showed it browsing the Web, running games and streaming 1440p video content running on a 2560?1600 panel. That will enable mobile devices to output to the highest resolution monitors or tablets equipped with a 10.1-inch display with 300 DPI.
Nvidia also disclosed its Tegra roadmap. This includes new Tegra chips that coming in the following years, which will offer a 2x or 5x increase in performance over the previous year.
Compared to the currently available Tegra 2 platform, the NVIDIA "Stark" platform will appear in 2014 and it will outperform Tegra 2 by a factor of 100x. In 2012 Nvidia will release the "Wayne" platform, which will be succeeded by the "Logan" platform one year later.