Tegra 3 CPU Is Five Times Faster Than Tegra 2

(Cross Posted from the Hand Held Hack) A quad core CPU for hand helds! Sweet! “Project Kal-El” – gotta love the Superman reference!

Nvidia ships Tegra 3, claims it’s up to five times faster than Tegra 2

“Nvidia says its Tegra 3 processor, previously code-named ‘Kal-El,’ is now in production, making its first appearance in the Android-powered Asus Transformer Prime before the end of the year. The chip includes five ARM Cortex A9 cores, but the fifth ‘Companion core’ runs only up to 500MHz, and is optimized for saving power when running background tasks, the company says.

Nvidia introduced and demonstrated its ‘Project Kal-El’ last February. At the time, the chip was touted as the world’s first quad-core mobile processor, including four ARM-based CPU cores plus a twelve-core GeForce GPU (graphics processing unit).

But on Sept. 20, Nvidia disclosed that the Tegra 3 would actually sport five ARM Cortex-A9 cores, not four. The fifth ‘Companion Core’ is identical to the other four, except that it has been built using low power process technology and runs only from 0 to 500MHz, as opposed to the ‘0 to max GHz’ delivered by the others, according to the company.”