It looks like Tegra 3 won’t be getting a replacement this year. Despite the fact that multiple sources close to the matter report that the chip is getting close to production, it won’t be launched this year.

Nvidia will unveil Tegra 4 at CES 2013 followed by more design win unveilings at the Mobile World Congress in February 2013. Tegra 4 is the likely name of Wayne chip that according to Nvidia’s Tegra roadmap is supposed to have ten times the performance of Tegra 2 dual-core and twice the performance of Tegra 3.

Both the graphics core and CPU will be significantly faster than Tegra 3 and the next Tegra in line should get a lot of design wins in 2013. Wayne will be compatible with LTE modems making it easier for US telecoms to launch phones based on next generation Tegra.

Tegra 3 got at least three significant design wins this year, including the Nexus 7, the most important of them all, Surface RT and HTC0s One X and X+. Samsung appears to be the biggest competitor for Nvidia quad-cores and beyond, while Qualcomm can also put a lot of pressure on Nvidia with its S4 line.

We are hearing that Tegra 4 ends up significantly faster than S4 in most areas and benchmarks. We don’t know if Wayne is fast enough to take on the iPhone 5’s A6 processor, the one that dominates the benchmarks across the globe.