Just the other day we’ve seen some initial information regarding an alleged quad-core Tegra 3-powered HTC Edge and now, the maker of the Tegra 3 chip, nVidia, has made the SoC official.

The nVidia Quad-Core Tegra 3 Chip is advertised to bring “PC-class performance levels, better battery life and improved mobile experiences to tablets and phones”. You probably remember the nVidia Kal-El demo from May; the new Tegra 3 SoC is basically the Kal-El, with “up to 3x the graphics performance of Tegra 2, and up to 61 percent lower power consumption”.

The Tegra 3 is really a penta-core chip because it sports a fifth core; while the four cores are crunching data with performance in mind, they can be completely shut off when throwing less power consuming processes to the chip, like listening to music. That is when the fifth core is activated. It will shut down when getting back to a certain performance-oriented task, when the four cores are activated again.

The nVidia Tegra 3 CPU comes with a 12-core GeForce GPU, delivering up to 3x the graphics performance of the Tegra 2 processor, including support for stereoscopic 3D for those future three-dimensional screens.

The Tegra 3 chip is already in production and suddenly quad-core smartphones aren’t that far out; we might even get the chance of seeing some Tegra 3-powered devices at the 2012 CES in Vegas or MWC in Barcelona. For further details as well as screenshots of a couple of games running on the new chip, follow the source link below.

Source: nVidia