Kal-El Has Five Cores, Not Four: NVIDIA Reveals the Companion Core

AnandTech reports about the next generation ARM SoC from NVidia nicknamed Kal-El which most likely will be base of the Tecra 3 platform. What takes most attention is the design of 4+1 processor core the so-called companion core. This fifth core is a low power one and the processor will switch from four high performance cores to this low power core in idle state by gating the high performance one's. A nice design which helps the power consumption at a affordable rate when idling. It is also a sign of the diverse landscape of ARM processors sharing the core logic but resulting in very different SoC's.