NVIDIA has released two whitepapers titled “The Benefits of Quad Core CPUs in Mobile Devices” and “Variable SMP – A Multi-Core CPU Architecture for Low Power and High Performance”. In the first whitepaper NVIDIA talks about the same old benefits of quad-core processor and how quad-core Kal-El uses less power than dual-core processors while doubling performance across the board, as you can see in the video below. However, it’s the second whitepaper where NVIDIA reveals interesting new details about Kal-El architecture, which now has a fifth “companion core”.

NVIDIA says that Kal-El processor implements a novel new Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing (vSMP) technology. The vSMP includes a fifth CPU core (the “Companion” core) built using a special low power silicon process that executes tasks at low frequency for active standby mode, music playback, and even video playback. The four main “quad” cores are built using a standard silicon process to reach higher frequencies for browsing, gaming and other power hungry tasks. All five cores are identical ARM Cortex A9 CPUs, and are individually enabled and disabled.

The “Companion” core is OS transparent, unlike current Asynchronous SMP architectures, meaning the OS and applications are not aware of this core, but automatically take advantage of it. This strategy saves significant software efforts and new coding requirements.

Since the Companion core is built on a low power process, it runs at lower frequencies (up to 500MHz) and consumes much lower power than the main CPU cores that can run at 1GHz. The Companion core is used primarily when the mobile device is in active standby and performing background tasks such as Email syncs, Twitter updates, Facebook updates etc, where users generally don’t care about how fast the process is completed.

In the whitepaper NVIDIA explains how the Companion core and Main cores are designed and how combining the two can increase performance as well as power efficiency, as can be seen in the graph. NVIDIA concludes the whitepaper by saying “The use of the Companion CPU core for background tasks and the use of main cores for performance-intensive tasks, enable Project Kal-El to deliver significantly lower power than competing mobile processors at all performance levels.”

NVIDIA is again making big claims about their next generation ARM based processor Kal-El, like they did before shipping Tegra 2. But as we have already seen their Tegra 2 claims of world’s best graphics engine and most powerful ARM CPU fell flat after the chip actually shipped and was compared with other mobile chips like Apple’s A5 on the market. Will this time things be different, maybe third time is a charm.