Topic summary
Tegra 3
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Tegra.
Tegra 3
NVIDIA's Tegra 3 (codenamed "Kal-El") is functionally a SoC with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU, but includes a fifth "companion" core in what Nvidia refers to as a "variable SMP architecture". While all cores are Cortex-A9s, the companion core is manufactured with a low-power silicon process. This core operates transparently to applications and is used to reduce power consumption when processing load is minimal. The main quad-core portion of the CPU powers off in these situations.