Nvidia details fifth core in Kal-el SoC

Nvidia has been touting Kal-el System-on-Chip to have four CPU cores however, an official whitepaper from Nvidia confirms that Kal-el has a fifth core that was not disclosed previously. The fifth core known as the Companion core works the same way as other processing cores but the only difference is that it is meant for low-processing tasks.

The Companion core will be used in instances of active standby where email, social network accounts etc. have to be synced in the background. In short, the device will use Kal-el’s powerful quad-core CPU for any resource-intensify task but will switch to the Companion core when low resource is needed due to its capped processing speed of up to 500MHz.

Nvidia says the fifth core is OS transparent, which means the operating system won’t be able to detect it but it will “automatically take advantage of it.”

You can read the official whitepaper with more information here [PDF].

[Via Nvidia Blog]

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