Four cores open more doors
Back at MWC NVIDIA Tegra boss Mike Rayfield blogged about the Tegra roadmap, confirming his pledge to produce a new Tegra chip every year and teasing this year's one as being the first quad core mobile chip - codenamed Kal-El.
NVIDIA subsequently stressed that didn't amount to a ‘launch' but it was clearly a big announcement, so we were getting into semantics that. One solid claim NVIDIA did make was that Kal-El would begin production this August, a vow it has yet to amend.
So while we're not necessarily expecting a ‘hard launch' at Computex, neither are we surprised to see NVIDIA trying to ramp up the hype in anticipation of such an event. Today that takes the form of ‘Glowball' - a video demo designed to show off the superior processing power of Kal-El.
We've embedded the video below, but it's best appreciated in 1080p. It shows a ball that emits its own light which is the only light source in the animated environment. The key thing seems to be that this demonstrates the ability of Kal-El to make lots of clever calculations on the fly, rather than drawing on pre-rendered animation.
The gauge in the corner shows all four Cortex A9 CPU cores working away, and to emphasise how hard they're all working NVIDIA switches a couple off later in the demo in order to show the consequent stuttering animation. Of course this is an NVIDIA video, produced in an NVIDIA environment, using a specially designed piece of software, but it does serve to whet the appetite.
