Nvidia's Tegra 3 system-on-a-chip for smartphones and tablets is getting a bit long in the tooth, but the company still hasn't officially announced when its successor, an SoC codenamed "Wayne," will be available in shipping products. We expect an official announcement soon—perhaps even at Nvidia's press conference at CES—but for now we're still piecing together information from older announcements and alleged leaks.

One such leak appeared this week, courtesy of Chinese-language site ChipHell. If it's legitimate (and it does appear to line up with information we already knew), it points to Wayne being a powerful SoC best suited for high-end tablets, but also a good fit for small, inexpensive ARM-based laptops or desktops. What we know so far paints a remarkably complete picture of what Wayne looks like, what it will be good at, and just how much better it will be than Tegra 3.

The CPU and GPU: a big step up

As in any SoC, the biggest focus is going to be on the CPU and the GPU. Tegra 3 combined four Cortex-A9 CPU cores with an extra low-power "companion core" that will switch on when a device is asleep or idle to continue performing background tasks. Wayne changes those A9 cores in for higher-performing Cortex-A15 cores. While we don't know clock speeds yet, you need look no further than our Nexus 10 review to see how thoroughly even a dual-core Cortex-A15 beats a quad-core Cortex-A9.

Those four A15 cores will again be accompanied by a low-power "companion core" to help with power consumption, though from the leak it's not clear what kind of core this will be. It could be an implementation unique to Nvidia. But it may also be a variant of ARM's big.LITTLE specification that pairs Cortex-A15 cores with Cortex-A7 cores supporting all of the same instructions but running more slowly and consuming less power. Either way, that extra core plus a shrink to a more power-efficient 28nm manufacturing process (already used by Qualcomm in many of its chips and by Nvidia itself in its recent GPUs) should help with the higher power consumption presented by the new CPU and GPU architectures.

That custom-made GPU is likewise a big upgrade over its predecessor. It's not just that the GPU core count has increased—from 12 in Tegra 3 to 72 in Wayne—but those cores will almost certainly be more closely related to Nvidia's current GeForce chips. Tegra 3 uses GPU cores with fixed functions—there are eight pixel shader cores and four vertex shader cores. Fixed-function cores like these hark back to older desktop GPU designs like the GeForce 6 and GeForce 7 series.

Wayne is widely expected to make the jump to a unified shader model in which the GPU's cores can perform pixel or vertex operations (and others as well) based on what the application demands—Nvidia's desktop GPUs implemented this technology back in 2006 with the GeForce 8 series and have continued using it since. Wayne will also support current standards like Direct3D 11 and OpenGL 4.0, as well as Nvidia-owned and developed technology like PhysX and CUDA. This opens the door to more GPU-accelerated applications on devices using Wayne SoCs.

Finally, like Samsung's Exynos 5, Wayne is courting tablet makers who want to use high-density displays like the one in the Nexus 10—the SoC natively supports both video encoding and decoding at 2560x1440, just a shade less than the Nexus 10's 2560x1600. We don't know anything about the chip's memory bandwidth yet, but it should at least be comparable to chips like the Exynos 5 and Apple's A5X and A6X if it's pushing such high-res displays. Dual-channel LPDDR2 and LPDDR3 RAM (both typically used in phones and tablets) is supported, as is DDR3L (a 1.35V version of standard desktop and laptop DDR3, down from the standard 1.5V).

Making connections

As with the Exynos 5, the CPU and GPU are a big part of the story, but they're not all of it. Nvidia is adding all the necessary connectivity options to the SoC so it can be part of low-cost laptops and convertibles, too—this will prove useful in devices running things like Chrome OS and Windows RT.

In addition to the standard storage interfaces you see supported by most ARM chips—UART, SDIO, I2S, and I2C—Wayne also natively supports USB 3.0 and dual-display output over HDMI. These capabilities again suggest Nvidia has hopes for Wayne outside of tablets—USB 3.0 and dual-display support are both great features to have if you're trying to compete with low-cost Atom convertibles or laptops. There's no mention on this slide about whether Wayne will natively support the SATA interface as the Exynos 5 does—whether that's a feature the chip will lack or just information missing from this slide is hard to say.

LTE support

The slides for Wayne offer no mention of LTE support, one of the sticking points that has kept Tegra 3 from seeing wide adoption in smartphones. Most OEMs have chosen rather to go with chips from Qualcomm which offer both separate LTE chips as part of a package deal and products with an LTE baseband integrated into the chip itself. This isn't an oversight; rather, Wayne simply isn't designed to serve the mainstream smartphone market (though that doesn't preclude it from appearing in high-end phones, as the Android OEMs continue to one-up each other in the specifications game).

There's another chip, codename "Grey," that has been slated to come out alongside Wayne on Nvidia roadmaps for over a year (Xbit Labs first reported it back in September of 2011). That chip will be less powerful than Wayne—take it with a grain of salt; Wikipedia says it will use Cortex-A9 cores like the current Tegra 3, and articles that talk about its architecture cite Wikipedia—but it will also consume less power, making it better suited for smartphones. Its other claim to fame is that it will integrate LTE capabilities from Icera, a company acquired by Nvidia last year. We know a bit less about Grey than we do about Wayne, but it has always been targeted to ship slightly later. I'd expect to hear more about it either at or after Wayne's official unveiling.

Nvidia is playing catch-up, but Wayne looks to be worth the wait

Nvidia isn't on the cutting edge with either Wayne or Grey—Samsung has already beaten them to market with a Cortex-A15-based chip that is already shipping in tablets and laptops (though Wayne looks to be more powerful than the Exynos 5 Dual). Qualcomm is eating everyone's lunch when it comes to shipping chips with integrated LTE.

What's really intriguing about Wayne is its GPU, which makes sense given Nvidia's pedigree. Using GPU cores more similar to those in its desktop and laptop parts opens up possibilities not just for gaming, but for GPGPU activities as well. It gives the next-generation Tegra a potential leg-up in small, inexpensive laptops like Samsung's ARM Chromebook. We will, of course, keep you abreast of Nvidia's official announcements as they happen, and we look forward to doing a full performance evaluation of both Wayne and Grey as soon as they begin appearing in shipping products.

Listing image by ChipHell