Along with the ASUS Transformer Prime reveal today, NVIDIA has just sent us deets of the processor powering the Taiwanese company’s latest Android tablet. We’ve talked about NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 processor (formerly known as Kal-El) before, but for the people who aren’t in the know, let us lay down some specs for you. Tegra 3 has four 1.5 GHz cores that deliver unprecedented performance that’s supplemented by a fifth, more power efficient, companion core. The fifth core (which is implemented by NVIDIA’s patent-pending tech called Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing) is specifically designed for work requiring little power, and kicks in during tasks that require less power consumption – like listening to music, playing back video or updating background data. NVIDIA says that Tegra 3 is able to deliver up to 3x the graphics performance compared to Tegra 2, and up to 61 percent lower power consumption.
Tegra 3 also comes with an array of other features, which include 12-core NVIDIA GeForce GPU, which delivers more realism with dynamic lighting, physical effects and high resolution environments, plus support for 3D stereo. Tegra 3 is also capable of being plugged into a 3D capable TV and automatically converts OpenGL applications to stereo 3D, so consumers can experience 3D on a big screen 3D TV (via HDMI 1.4 technology).