Post by Harry McCall with El Paso IT Group, Ltd

Dual-core smartphones seemed a thing of the distant future just last year and the recently leaked NVIDIA roadmap mentioning a quad-core SOC in the works for release this Fall seemed too good to be true. But luckily – it is not. NVIDIA announced its quad-core Kal-El system-on-chip, which would most likely be called Tegra 3, coming to tablets as soon as by this year and to smartphones a little later.

This definitely sounds like very aggressive timing and we can only hope to see NVIDIA stick to it. So far, its strategy brought huge success as most dual-core smartphones of today went with the Tegra 2 platform. But is the upcoming quad-core chip the Superman of chips as its name suggests? Read on to find out.

It will be the world's first mobile quad-core CPU bringing a brand new 12-core NVIDIA GPU with support for 3D stereo and “Extreme HD” videos with stunning quality of 2560 x 1600 pixels. It really sounds extreme, doesn't it? Oh, did we mention it will be 5 times faster than the current smartphone/tablet heavyweight – the Tegra 2? But it doesn't stop here as NVIDIA is committed to yearly updates

It left us speechless when we saw it cracking the benchmarks. On Coremark 1.0 it scored the unbelievable 11,354 points, more than a Core2Duo T7200 processor, which could only score 10,136.

The layouts you see here maps an exciting future. The Wayne chip in 2012 will double the performance of Kal-El, while Logan in 2013 will make things truly heroic giving a 5 times performance boost over Logan! The distant future of 2014 is to bring Stark - a 100 times more productive unit than Tegra 2.

Finally, it seems that plans for Tegra 3D chip were either cancelled or pushed back to give the priority to the Kal-El SOC. Can other manufacturers keep up? Let us at Clear-Cloud Network know your opinion via email at   info@clear-cloud.com