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28nm NVIDIA Tegra 4 details surface, promise 10 times more power than Tegra 2

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The Tegra 2 platform was quite a success for NVIDIA, finding its way to a dozen of smartphones and tablets and it even became the standard hardware platform for Android Honeycomb. But the company is certainly not going to stop there. We already know that its successor, codenamed Kal-El, will come later this year with a quad-core CPU on board, but now we also got some details about the version after that, codenamed Wayne.

The 28nm NVIDIA Wayne will be commercially available as Tegra 4 and will actually come in two flavors. The less powerful one will sport “at least 24-core” CUDA-enabled GPU, which resembles contemporary GPU architecture and a quad-core CPU, clocked at least 1.5GHz. According to NVIDIA that should be enough to provide at least 10x the computing power of the currently available Tegra 2 chipset.

The other version of the Wayne silicon is where it gets really interesting. It should sport 8 (that’s right, eight) CPU cores, and 32 to 64 CUDA-enabled GPU cores. Unfortunately, its power requirements might steer that chip away from smartphones, but it will certainly hit tablets, netbooks and ultra-low-power notebooks.

The two NVIDIA Wayne versions should be available to hardware and software developers in December 2011. Obviously, the first devices with it are not going to be available before the middle of 2012, but a year wait for a 10 times gain in speed seems fair to us.

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