It feels like only yesterday that we were all drooling over the performance capabilities of NVIDIA Tegra 2 and how its dual-coreness blows single-cores out of the water. Well, get ready to be blown away again, this time by NVIDIA’s Project Kal-El. Superman fans probably get the reference.

Realistically thought of as the Tegra 2 successor, Kal-El will be the world’s first mobile quad-core CPU. NVIDIA is already sending out samples and they expect Android devices will start getting released with Kal-El under the hood this August. That’s crazy acceleration, don’t you think? Remember that both Qualcomm and TI OMAP5 aren’t going to show up on devices until 2012.

With Project Kal-El, we can expect five times the performance of Tegra 2, support for “extreme HD” (2560×1600), and silky smooth 60fps gaming on the go (compared to just 20fps on Tegra 2). In a CoreMark benchmark, Kal-El actually outperformed a true Intel Core2Duo T7200 processor by a score of 11,354 vs. 10,136.

But wait. There’s more. NVIDIA revealed its roadmap for the next few years, following up Kal-El by Wayne in 2012, Logan in 2013, and Stark in 2014. Project Stark is expected to deliver 100x the performance of Tegra 2 and that’s just three years from now. It’s a good time for mobile enthusiasts and it’ll be really interesting to see how Qualcomm and TI respond to NVIDIA’s bold moves.

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Set to hit production next month, the Exynos dual-core processor might have been beaten to the punch by the NVIDIA Tegra2 and it might get lost in the shadows behind a Snapdragon alternative. That said, Samsung has demonstrated its prowess in this realm with Hummingbird already.

But why Exynos? Apparently, it’s a portmanteau of exypnos and prasinos, Greek words meaning “smart” and “green,” respectively. The assumption, then, is that they’re working on lower power consumption and all that jazz too.

Exynos associates Samsung’s “smart and green” strategy adopted by its semiconductor devices and solutions developed specifically to support the stringent performance and power requirements of mobile devices. Smart refers to high-performance aspect and Green represents low power features of Samsung’s application processors. Exynos originates from the Greek words smart (exypnos) and green (prasinos).

The Exynos 4210 (once known as the Orion) will be the first chip in the line. Now we just have to wait for a quad core chip announcement to rival the TI OMAP5 line.

[Giz via Samsung

The post New Dual Core Samsung Mobile Chip Named Exynos – Arrives March appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Remember when the first 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chips hit the scene and we amazed by having a “G” in the mobile CPU’s clock speed? And now NVIDIA Tegra2 is winning many hearts with its dual core wonders? Not to be outdone, the upcoming TI OMAP5 chips are going to boast four cores of processing.

“But the NVIDIA Tegra3 beat them to the punch!

True. The Tegra3 will do the quad-core thing, but “only” at up to 1.5GHz. The new OMAP5 platform will offer four cores going nutso at up to 2GHz. That’s supposed to offer up to 3x the processing power of the OMAP4 (which will power the BlackBerry PlayBook) while improving power consumption by 60%.

What’s interesting is that the four cores aren’t the same. You get two ARM Cortex-A15 cores (up to 2GHz) and two ARM Cortex-M4 cores. Combined, OMAP5 is said to support up to three QSXGA (2560×2048) displays at the same time.

Sure, that all sounds good on paper, but will it work in practice? That’s the bad news. Samples aren’t going to get shipped out to manufacturers until late 2011 with actual OMAP5-powered devices following in mid-2012. By then, Tim might have already Franken-welded four Tegra2 chips together for more power. (Grunts notwithstanding.)

[PhoneScoop]

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