Nvidia's CEO boasted about the power frugality of an upcoming quad-core chip during the company's fiscal second quarter earnings Q & A session. Nvidia swung to better-than-expected earnings in the fiscal second quarter ended July 31. The company reported a profit of $151.6 million compared with a loss of $141 million in the year-earlier period. Revenue surged 25 percent to $1.02 billion.

Responding to an analyst's question during the earnings conference call, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said the upcoming Kal-El processor--likely the first mainstream quad-core ARM chip--will actually offer better power efficiency than the company's dual-core Tegra 2, currently used in tablets from Motorola, Samsung, Toshiba, Acer, and others. Those tablets are based on Google's Android operating system.

"Kal-El is so much better performance than Tegra 2. And so much lower power. Very few people have internalized that Kal-El is lower power in every use case compared to Tegra 2," Huang said. Kal-El is due later this year.

But Nvidia's future is not all pegged on Android. Its quad-core chip is also targeted at Windows 8 tablets and laptops. "We're very bullish on Windows 8 for the second half of next year," he said.