How about twice the performance for less power?

What if your new tablet or phone had twice the processing power, but used less power than current crop of devices? That is exactly what Nvidia is cooking up with it's new Kal-El Tegra ARM processor. The Kal-El Tegra is Nvida's next generation Tegra processor. It will actually be a 5 core processor with the 5th core being a special super low power "companion" core. The extra core will have just enough horsepower to keep important things going that don't need a 1.5 GHz processor. This is things like music, phone calls, email syncs, notifications, and background tasks. In doing said tasks, it will use very little power. The other 4 cores are full processors that run at the full speed of 1.5 or even 2 GHz. The chip can power each of these 4 "regular" cores up or down as needed.

Moore's law is certainly still working with ARM processors. The performance is doubling every 12 months. No wonder Microsoft is supporting ARM processors on Windows 8. It has the power for all your typical desktop tasks and some pretty serious gaming too.

The power consumption situation still extremely favorable for ARM. The Tegra draws about 2 watts max. Typical power draw is much lower. Intel's current dual core Atom processors draws 8.5 - 13 watts max. That is a factor of 5.

Kal-El Tegra www.thinq.co.uk/2011/9/20/nvidias-kal-el-tegra-pack-five-cores/
Tegra en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Tegra