HTC has spilled the beans on what appears to be the world’s first quad-core phone, the Nvidia powered HTC Edge.

According to Pocketnow, the new handset will appear sometime in 2012 and it will sport Nvidia’s Tegra 3 quad-and-change-core processor along with a serving of Ice Cream Sandwich. Other highlights include a 4.7-inch 720p screen, 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and an 8MP camera.

The phone seems loosely based on the HTC Titan and it will boast the latest HTC apps and services, also known as bloatware. In terms of performance, the HTC Edge should be second to none. In just over a year high end Android phones have gone from single core 1GHz chips to dual-cores at 1.2GHz – 1.4GHz.

The Edge will raise the bar even further, to 1.5GHz on a 40nm quad-core, but whether anyone really needs that level of performance remains to be seen. In any case, the impressive spec sheet should come in handy for marketing purposes.

More here.