Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage at CES on Sunday evening to unveil, among other things, the company's next-generation tablet chip: the Tegra 4.

By Huang's own admission, the chip is one of the company's "worst-kept secrets," and the core specifications are basically identical to those that were leaked last month: four Cortex-A15 CPU cores (along with an additional low-power companion core, which switches on when the tablet is idle to save power) take care of the CPU side, while 72 GeForce GPU cores boost graphics performance over Tegra 3.

In a side-by-side webpage loading test with Google's Nexus 10 (the current reigning champion of Android tablet performance) a Tegra 4-based prototype loaded a set of webpages nearly twice as quickly: 27 seconds compared to 50 seconds. It's worth noting that the Tegra tablet appeared to be running the stock Android browser, however, while the Nexus 10 was running Google Chrome—the latter browser has proven to have slightly lower benchmarking scores, so take these results with a grain of salt.

The chip will also include a separate 4G LTE modem of Nvidia's design, the i500 soft modem, which begins sampling to partners this month. Current cellular chips use fixed-function parts to enable certain technologies (3G, 4G, and so on). Nvidia's software-programmable approach allows each of the i500's eight multi-purpose processors to perform different functions as needed: the same silicon can provide support for multiple wireless technologies, which greatly cuts down on the amount of silicon needed to provide phones and tablets with the different connectivity options they need. This modem is the first fruit of Nvidia's 2011 purchase of Icera Semiconductor.

In particular, Nvidia played up the new Tegra chip's photo processing capabilities. By placing the CPU "closer to the imaging pipeline," Huang promised that Tegra 4-based devices would be capable of real-time HDR photography and video shooting, fixing the exposure problems that so often trip up mobile devices.

Tegra 4's sheer size and power requirements mean that it's probably not destined for smartphones. That market will most likely fall to Nvidia's next smartphone chip, codenamed "Grey," which is also rumored to include an integrated LTE modem like the i500, though Huang didn't discuss this chip on stage at Nvidia's CES event. This will help Nvidia catch up to competitors like Qualcomm, who are already shipping SoCs with integrated LTE modems.

We'll be talking with Nvidia more later this week and will keep you posted with any new details we learn.