Nvidia released a whitepaper detailing the specs and what developers and users should expect from Kal-El (Nvidia’s upcoming Quad-core processor). The overview of the whitepaper shows that Nvidia will be using the traditional quad-core system plus it will also add an extra low power processor called the “Companion Core”.

The 5th lower core will be used mainly for background tasks such as synching mail, managing social networking sites (facebook, twitter), browsing the web and carrying out audio and video playback operations. Using the fifth core for background tasks enables the other 4 ARM Cortex A9 cores to boast their performance by concentrating mainly on the tasks at hand, so we can expect a higer performance in this CPU. The fifth core comes quite in handy when saving battery life and for multi-tasking. When your not using the device and the OS has to do some background tasks it’ll do it on the 5th core that only uses a fraction of power compared to the other cores.

Kal-El will also feature a 12-core GPU (mind blowing isn’t it) that is capable of running an OS in “Extreme HD” that is 2560 x 1600 resolution. This combo of CPU and GPU puts Kal-El light years ahead of anything we have seen so far. Kal-El is expected to be 5 times stronger than the current Tegra 2 processor while using less battery than the dual-core processors. Overall this is gonna be a Super Processor, we can only wait to see what it can do inside tablets and phones.