Nvidia Unveils Muscular Tegra 4 Quad-Core Chipset

At its CES press conference yesterday, Nvidia announced Tegra 4, its next-generation quad-core processor for tablets and smartphones. Nvidia based Tegra 4 on ARM's latest Cortex-A15 architecture, which means that its processing power will be dramatically faster than the current Tegra 3 quad-core chipset, which is based on ARM Cortex A-9. In addition to the new architecture, Nvidia's Tegra 4 system-on-a-chip contains a whopping 72 graphics cores - six times what's built into in Tegra 3. It also includes Nvidia's first 4G LTE modem.

One trick in the Tegra 4 bag includes HDR, or high dynamic range. The processor very quickly takes two photos, one at high exposure and one at low, and recombines them into a single, richer photo. While many chipsets allow for HDR, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, said that Tegra 4 takes shots at a rate of 0.2 seconds per frame, making Tegra 4 10 times faster than the iPhone 5, which took an HDR shot in 2 seconds.