Jen-Hsun Huang expects Kal-el to be a chip of steel for tablets

KAL-EL and Tegra 2 will give Nvidia the advantage to win in the all-conquering tablet sector that is to come, according to its CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, despite a drop in fourth quarter revenues year-on-year.

Without a hint of modesty, Nvidia said its new quad-core chip that it will ship in the second half of this year is called Kal-el, a reference to Superman's real Kryptonian name.

At Mobile World Congress The INQUIRER was given an August launch date for the chip. Huang told Nvidia's fourth quarter earnings call that Kal-el has five times the performance of the first Tegra chipset but said nothing about Tegra 2.

Despite its alleged alien origins, Kal-el is only a 40nm scale processor. Huang justified this by saying that the Green Goblin wants to go to 28nm but that will not happen until the end of 2011 at the earliest. So Tegra chipsets fabbed at that scale will arrive in 2012. He added that the 40nm process is mature and is delivering "fantastic yields" in the meantime.

Bigging up quad core, Huang explained that because each core operates at lower than TDP cycles, even when multitasking, the chip gets better overall energy efficiency.

Until Kal-el flies into action Tegra 2 is going to have to pull in the cash for Nvidia. It is not doing too badly so far and is tipping up in tablets, including Asus' EeePad Slider and EeePad Transformer and Acer's Iconia A500 tablets, Dell's Streak, LG's Optimus Pad, Motorola's Xoom and Toshiba's as yet unnamed 10-inch Honeycomb tablet.

No doubt Huang is hoping that a bunch of design wins will help with future revenues, to offset the drop in income from the $982.5 million generated in the fourth quarter ending 30 January 2010 to $886.4 million this year. Ouch. Design wins don't always translate into shipping products, so future results are yet to be seen.

What was less credible was Huang's bizarre comment about tablets, which he says "are now completely flash accelerated so you can go to any website". Flash is not supported by the Ipad, the biggest selling tablet so far, so The INQUIRER thinks Huang might have overstated that.

However, the ever optimistic Huang said the Tegra 2 design wins are only the beginning, as Microsoft's announcement that it will work with ARM chipsets means future Tegra products, which are ARM based, will be aimed at the PC market and specifically notebooks.

Why notebooks is because tablets will consume all, according to Huang. "Computers will become thinner and easier to use and tablets will become the PC," he confidently told the earnings call.

For Huang the PC will simply come in different flavours. From small tablets that he said we now call smartphones, to larger tablets that we call, eh, tablets, and then up to notebook sized expensive drink trays, and finally the super large tablets that are now known as All-in-ones. If you are a keyboard manufacturer you might want to start to worry.

Huang denied that Nvidia had been impacted by Intel's Sandy bridge 6 series chipset problems and instead said he expected forthcoming games like Crysis 2 to drive uptake of the second generation Intel architecture. µ