Need to Know – Nvidia Tegra 3

Nvidia Tegra 3 – more than quad-core

Technically the Tegra 3 – formerly Project Kal-El – is a quad-core mobile chip that manages super-power speeds with energy management so efficient, a tax official would be impressed. In reality it has five cores.

Each is an ARM Cortex A9 CPU. But while four run at high-speed (max 1.4GHz), one is hidden from the OS and used at lower frequencies (max 500MHz) for simple processes – thereby allowing the others to rest and save power.

This process is called Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing (vSMP) and is ideal for things like playing music and video, syncing email and social neworking apps, updating active widgets and so on, while in low-power standby.