[XPERIA X10 General] OmegaRED^:
Low power Processing brunt for phones, netbooks, laptops & tablets.

It seems ARM and Nvidia have big plans for the future.

Newer small chipsets like these will sport some serious multi core action.

Here's the basic road map.

Tegra 3 (Kal-El) series

Processor: Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore, up to 1.5 GHz

12-Core Nvidia GPU with support for 3D stereo

Ultra Low Power GPU mode

40 nm process by TSMC

Video output up to 2560×1600

NEON vector instruction set

1080p MPEG-4 AVC/h.264 High Profile video decode

The Kal-El chip (CPU and GPU) is to be about 5 times faster than Tegra 2

Estimated release date is now to be Q4 2011 for tablets and Q1 2012 for smartphones, after being set back from Nvidia's prior estimated release dates of Q2 2011, then August 2011, then October 2011

The Tegra 3 is functionally a quad-core processor, but includes a fifth "companion" core. All cores are Cortex-A9's, but the companion core is manufactured with a special low power silicon process. This means it uses less power at low clock rates, but more at higher rates; hence it is limited to 500 MHz. There is also special logic to allow running state to be quickly transferred between the companion core and one of the normal cores. The goal is for a mobile phone or tablet to be able to power down all the normal cores and run on only the companion core — using comparatively little power — during "standby" mode or when otherwise using little CPU. According to Nvidia, this includes playing music or even video content.

Tegra (Wayne) series

Processor: Quad-core/Octa-core ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore (octa core already)

Improved 24 (for the Quad Version) and 32 to 64 (for the Octa-core Version) GPU cores with support for Directx 11+, OpenGL 4.X, OpenCL 1.X, and Physx

28 nm

About 10 times faster than Tegra 2

To be released in 2012

Tegra (Grey) series

Processor: ARM Cortex MPCore

28 nm

Integrated Icera 3G/4G baseband

To be released in 2012

Tegra (Logan) series

Processor: ARM ?

Improved GPU core

28 nm[23]

About 50 times faster than Tegra 2

To be released in 2013

Tegra (Stark) series

Processor: ARM ?

Improved GPU core

About 75 times faster than Tegra 2[24]

To be released in 2014

THE TEGRA 3's SECERET CORE? what does it do?

There's a not-so-dirty little secret about NVIDIA's upcoming Tegra 3 platform (which will soon find a home in plenty of mobile devices): the quad-core processor contained within has a fifth core for less intensive tasks.

In a paper published by NVIDIA, they provided in-depth details about their Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing (vSMP). Simply put, vSMP implemented in Kal-El not only optimizes CPU multi-threading and multi-tasking for max performance and power efficency at a moments notice, but it offloads background tasks and less intensive CPU activities, such as background syncing/updating, music playback, video playback to the fifth core, which runs at a considerably slower 500 MHz, and therefore consumes considerably less power. Bottom line: battery life!

All five CPU cores are identical ARM Cortex A9 CPUs, and are individually enabled and disabled (via aggressive

power gating) based on the work load. 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.

The Tegra 3 logic controller also has the power to dynamically enable and disable cores depending on the workload at any given time, making sure not to waste any power from unused cores. So what's the quantitative payoff?

NVIDIA ran Coremark benchmark using the Tegra 3 and pitted it against against current industry chipsets, such as the TI OMAP4 and the Qualcomm 8x60 (take these with a grain of salt, obviously). They found that when handling the same workload, Tegra 3 consumed 2-3x less power than the competition. When running max performance tests, the Tegra 3 was twice as fast while still using less power.

Compared to the Tegra 2 chipset, the Tegra 3 CPU uses 61% less power while video playback is happening, and 34% less power during gaming activities. While most of the work is done by the GPUs in mobile devices, previous chipsets lacked the ability to ramp down the energy output of unused cores like Tegra 3 is purportedly able to do.

What I'm trying to say is that you should be excited for this mobile quad-core processor to arrive and not scared for your battery life.