As it turns out, the roadmap given out last month by NVIDIA listing out its future concepts was actually a correct reflection of the company’s plans. There were echoes of disbelief when the silicon giant declared a quad-core Tegra chip could come out in the near future, with many calling it a marketing gimmick to keep customers looking up to it. However, it is now official that such chips do exist, with NVIDIA even claiming to have handed some out to their prospective clients for testing. Codenamed Kal-El (hardly contentious considering that its closest competitors are still galaxies behind), the chip is likely to be called the Tegra 3 when it is made available in the consumer market.
In a demo shown by NVIDIA with the chip in action, the mini-powerhouse was seen churning out its muscle in multitasking assignments that no one had expected any chip in the market to be capable of for at least a year or so. The chip was seen decoding a stream of resolution 2560×1440, scaled down to a screen measuring 1366×766 pixels, while also playing the same on a 2560×1600 monitor. While heaving all this workload on its tiny shoulders, Kal-El impressed one and all in the audience and without breaking a sweat.
According to estimates by NVIDIA, the processing power possessed by Tegra 3 is double that of Tegra 2 and it has around three times more power in handling graphics. The chip boasts of a total of twelve GPU cores in its tiny form. And to answer those worried about the power drain it is likely to cause in their devices, NVIDIA claims that there is no reason to worry as it promises a power efficiency which can play as many as 12 hours of HD content in the right settings. The only wait now is for this giant of a dwarf to be available at the earliest.
