MWC: Nvidia quad core Kal-el chip demo video

CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia is showing off its quad-core Kal-el chip, which the firm claims is the first quad core system-on-chip (SoC) in existance, at Mobile World Congress.

Following on from its unveiling of the dual core Tegra 2 chip at last month's CES, Nvidia boasts that it is continuing to raise the performance bar on the high-end mobile chip market with Kal-el. The demonstration tablet on show at MWC 2011 is a technology preview, however Nvidia says that devices based on the chip should tip up by August.

The demonstration shows a game that has been ported from Xbox 360 to run on Kal-el. Also Nvidia ran a video showing how relatively mundane tasks such as web browsing can make use of a quad core processor. While the game demo was running in real time, Nvidia said that the web browsing demo was intended to highlight the use of its multi-core chip in simple scenarios.

The Kal-el SoC contains not only four general purpose compute cores but 12 Geforce cores, though Nvidia would not go into any further details on specifications.

Nvidia wouldn't let us play around with the tablet itself. However, as it's a development device, not much should be read into the aesthetics of the tablet itself. µ