It’s a well known fact that processors have to compromise when it comes to performance and battery life – simply put, you can’t have one without sacrificing the other. Well, NVIDIA is taking a novel approach at solving that whole performance VS. battery life conundrum in their new Kal-El quad-core processor by introducing a fifth core they’ve dubbed the companion core. This companion core runs on a lower frequency and operates at exceptionally low power, users do web reading, music playback and video playback. As users open more computationally intense tasks, Kal-El disables its companion core and turns on its four performance cores, one at a time, as the work load increases. If you want to find out the nitty-gritty technical details, you can check the whitepapers yourself here and here.