Nvidia's fancy Kal-El quad-core mobile processor that is supposed to be five times faster than the current Tegra 2 is a 40nm part. This was confirmed by Nvidia.

Now this explains a lot as TSMC won't start risk production of 28nm before Q4 2011 and even then we guess it would be risky to make a completely new big mobile chip on a new and unproven process.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang confirmed that the chip is 40nm during the latest earnings conference call. He said that 28nm will ge available in very late 2011 and since Kal-El should ship in Q3, the production should already start in Q2.Jensen also claims that yields are fabulous on 40nm and that it just makes sense for them.

You can expect that this chip might need much more energy than Tegra 2 as we guess it will be quite a bit bigger. It has four cores as well as a much bigger graphics part, but we are sure that some vendors won't mind that much as most of the power is drawn by the display anyway.

The 28nm chip seems to be scheduled for the latter part of 2012, along with OMAP 4 and the quad-core Snapdragon APQ8064.