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Nvidia has today officially announced its imminent Tegra 3 mobile chipset, with the quad-core processor previously known as “Kal-El” being sold as more powerful and 61 per cent more efficient. Nvidia says it’ll manage 12 hours of average HD playback.
Nvidia’s announcement goes into a lot of detail about the technical magic it’s performed, with Tegra 3 operating on a Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing [PDF] basis — meaning it includes a fifth processor, capable of bravely working alone when you’re doing something only requiring minimal processing.
And don’t make the mistake of blundering in with a complaint that it’ll “eat battery” — Nvidia says its quad-core setup should “generally consume less power than dual-core processors.”
Asus will be the first manufacturer to bring Tegra 3 to market, with its also just announced Eee Pad Transformer our first way to test out Nvidia’s claims. [Nvidia via Techradar]
This thing is clever, well done to NVIDIA for it 5th hidden core solution, all the cores being capable of running at once is no good when your device is flat and won’t switch on!