Details about NVIDIA’s latest system on a chip (SoC) for mobile devices leaked last month. On Sunday, NVIDIA officially released its Tegra 4 chip, and talked up more details on the new silicon.

Interestingly, the leaked information from the slide held true over the weekend when NVIDIA officially unveiled it during a press conference. The new chip is manufactured on a 28nm, low power, high-k metal gate process.  It features four ARM Cortex-A15 CPU cores running at up to 1.9GHz, one (additional) low power Cortex-A15 companion core, a NVIDIA GeForce GPU with 72 cores (not unified shader design unfortunately). In addition, the Tegra 4 SoC includes the company’s i500 programmable soft modem, and a number of fixed function hardware used for audio and image processing.

According to Anandtech, the majority of GPU cores in the Tegra 4 are 20-bit pixel shaders though exact specifications on the GPU are still unknown. Further, the i500 modem currectly supports LTE UE Category 3 on the WCDMA band with an LTE 4 modem expected in the future.

Image Credit: ArsTechnica attended the NVIDIA press conference.

Tegra 4 will support dual channel LP-DDR3 memory, USB 3.0, and a technology that NVIDIA is calling its Computational Photography Architecture that allegedly will allow real-time HDR imagery with still and video shoots.

According to NVIDIA, Tegra 4 will be noticeably faster than its predecessors and the competing SoCs from Apple and Qualcomm et al. When compared to the Nexus 10 (Samsung Exynos 5 SoC) and the stock Android web browser, the Tegra 4 device (Chrome browser) opened pages in 27 seconds versus the Nexus 10’s 50 second benchmark time. Users will have to wait for retail devices with Tegra 4 hardware for independent benchmarks, however. Thanks to the higher top-end clockspeed and beefier GPU, you can expect Tegra 4 to be faster than Tegra 3, but until reviewers get their hands on Tegra 4-powered devices it is difficult to say just how much faster it is.

CES 2013: NVIDIA Officially Releases Tegra 4 SoC - General Tech 3

Speaking of hardware, the Tegra 4 chip will most likely be used in tablets (and not smartphones). Here’s hoping we see some prototype Tegra 4 devices or product announcements later this week at CES.

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