NVIDIA quad-core chipset provide great power efficiency thanks to an extra core

NVIDIA Kal-El has a secret the quad-core CPU actually has a fifth core, called a companion core. Its a low-power core that is meant to handle background tasks while the phone is idle.

The architecture of the companion core has been designed with power efficiency in mind and its clock speed goes up to 500MHz.That does not offer a lot of performance, but for a lot of tasks you do not need it and it manages to offer great power savings.

When you need more processing power, the companion core switches off and the fast cores come out either one, two or all four of them, depending on how much processing power you need.

The switching between the different modes is handled by the chipset, so there is no need for modifications to the OS or individual apps that should make it really easy for manufacturers to switch to the Kal-El platform.