NVIDIA Unveils Project Kal-El Quad Core Super Chip

Today at Mobile World Congress 2011 NVIDIA gave myself and small group of media, a demonstration of their latest sampling quad-core chipset code named Project Kal-El. This would be the world first sampling quad-core chipset aimed at tablets and super phones. NVIDIA executives on site stated that they expect Kal-El to deliver 5X performance improvements over their current super chip Tegra 2.

The demonstration they gave was running on a development kit that looked like a finished tablet. They started by showing their latest generation quad-core chip decoding a video stream with a 1440p resolution; roughly double the resolution of 1080p and outputting video at 2560x1440 to a computer monitor set to 2560x1600.

Next they gave us a demonstration of a game, which the developer did not have permission for us to name or take photo's or video off due to copyright's not being finalized. This demonstration however was incredibly vibrant and visually stunning.  The tablet running Tegra 2 was delivering this game at approx. 18-20 FPS while the demo of the game on their quad-core chipset was delivering 50-55 fps.

I did get to video and take pictures of a game by War Drum Studios Great Battles Medieval, which was delivering roughly 3x improvement on the quad-core Kal-El. What was equally remarkable was that War Drum Studio CEO Thomas Williamson just got access to the quad-core development board last night and successfully ported his game for today's demonstration.

[vms 96320eb3afdd4df6e1f6]

Most importantly however was that NVIDIA executives stated that they were targeting August as the time frame for the availability of tablets running Kal-El and by holiday 2011 for super phones.   Which means we may very well have quad-core tablets and super phones in retail this year.