Back in September 2011, Nvidia announced that it was making a slight adjustment to its 5-year Tegra roadmap and would be introducing a Tegra SoC with integrated Icera baseband called "Grey" sometime in 2013. As a result of the adjustment, its fourth-generation Tegra "Wayne" architecture had been pushed from 2012 to the first half of 2013, while "Grey" will be introduced in the third quarter.

 

According to a leaked specification sheet stemming from Chinese sources close to VR-Zone, the company will now be introducing at least four different Tegra 4 models over the first three quarters of 2013 (Q1 and Q3 respectively), all using the same "4-PLUS-1" quad-core plus fifth companion core architecture. Three of the four chips will be based on ARM's 28nm Cortex-A15 quad-core design, and there is strong reason to believe that Nvidia will improve upon this design by adding components of its highly energy-efficient Kepler GPU architecture into the mix.



Image source: VR-Zone

With that said, Nvidia's first Tegra 4 "Wayne" chip launches in Q1 2013 and will be the flagship "T40," running at 1.8 GHz on 4-plus-1 cores and targeted at 10-inch tablets. The company will then follow up about six months later with a successor flagship design in Q3 called "T43," running at 2.0 GHz on 4-plus-1 cores and targeted again at 10-inch tablets.

On the mainstream front, Nvidia will be launching two more chips in Q3, one of which includes a 4G LTE baseband. The company's mainstream chips are the "AP40" and the "SP3X," based on two separate ARM designs, respectively. The AP40 ("Wayne") will be based on ARM Cortex A15 architecture, will run between 1.2 GHz and 1.8 GHz and will be targeted at 10-inch tablets. In contrast, the SP3X ("Grey") will be based on ARM Cortex A9 architecture, will run between 1.2 GHz and 2.0 GHz, will be targeted at 7-inch devices and will feature an Icera LTE100 / HSPA42 baseband supporting both 4G LTE and 42Mbps HSPA+ connectivity.

All in all, Nvidia's Tegra 4 Cortex A9 design will be the only chip to receive dual-mode LTE / HSPA+ support, while the three Cortex A15 designs will be more optimized for compute performance and bandwidth. All in all, we hope to receive more information from Nvidia regarding design implementations and prototype Tegra 4 "Wayne" and "Grey" products this June at Computex 2012.