Quad-core Kal-El’s Stealth Fifth Core Lets it Save on Energy

blogs.nvidia.com

47 points·darshan··8 comments

Taking a page from TI's OMAP processors I see [1]. I expect that AMD will go this route sooner or later by putting a Bobcat and Bulldozer core on the same chip, but I've heard that while the Linux scheduler can deal with that, Windows can't yet. Don't know if NVidia will have trouble with that with Windows 8.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMAP

All the SoCs have little cores that can't run the OS. Kal-El is the first one that can shift everything onto the little core.

As a mobile game developer, I am super excited about the future of gaming on mobile after looking at the spec sheets for this chip and the new PowerVR series 6 GPUs. I am in constant amazement that my phone-shaped pocket computer is a more capable gaming device than my PC of less than tens years ago.

PowerVR series 6: 350 million ‘real’ polygons per second http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR#Series_6

Xbox 360: 500 million triangles per second http://hardware.teamxbox.com/articles/xbox/1144/The-Xbox-360...

I don't understand enough about the two systems to know if these figures are measuring the same thing. But if they are, the series 6 is getting pretty close.

Seems like the last time I looked up the GFLOPS on my PC GPU it came in as equal to the fastest supercomputer of 14 years ago.

Via a quick Google, some of the newer Radeon cards can push in excess of 2500GFLOPs.

And you can squeeze up to four of those into one box! (that's going to need a pretty hefty power supply)

I wonder how 12-core GPU compares with the xbox360's 6 year old GPU? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_hardware#Graphics_proc...)

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