As rumored and supported by a leaked Tegra roadmap, Nvidia was expected to launch Tegra 3 here at MWC. They haven’t done that but they are giving us a preview of it except they aren’t putting the Tegra 3 label on it just yet, it’ll go by the internal “Kal-El codename for now. Nvidia might end up going with a different name but I don’t think that’s likely given the Tegra brand is picking up steam. Kal-El is indeed quad-core and supports up to 2560 x 1600 resolutions over multiple displays and boasts 5x the performance of Tegra 2, or 2x CPU and 3x GPU performance when you break that down.
One particular benchmark has it well ahead of a Tegra 2 and a little ahead of a dual core Core 2 Duo T7200. Our biggest worry would be battery life but Nvidia claims the new platform is much more power effecient and claims 12 hours of HD video playback. The 1440p video playback demo only consumes about 400 milliwatts of power. It’s expected out on the market in tablets in around August and towards the end of the year for smartphones albeit a slightly downgraded version.
Videos from Nvidia and LaptopMag of the event showing off the various demos (web browsing, video playback and gameplay)
UPDATE: Hands on Video Demo
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