Nvidia Tegra 3 Architecture renamed to "4-PLUS-1" as it has 5 Cores

What Makes the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor unique and more advanced than others Quad-core Architectures out there ? It features a fifth companion-core.

The job of this core is to handle all the usual menial tasks while the four performance cores rest, to be called upon only when there is a need for significant graphical power, such as in 3D games. This results in amazing battery life because the companion core consumes very little power compared to the four performance cores.

This kind of architecture is called as variable symmetric architecture (or vSMP). But as you can image that is not something that would look at home on a box or a store sign, which is why Nvidia kept calling it things like having a companion core or ninja core.

Nvidia have finally come up with a proper name for it and they have trademarked it too. And that name is 4-PLUS-1.