It's CES 2013, and NVIDIA has just kicked it off in a way that only NVIDIA can: by announcing the world's first quad-core A15 CPU – the Tegra 4. It uses the same 4-PLUS-1 setup as the Tegra 3, which has the fifth "battery saving" core, but supercharges it in basically every way imaginable. For starters, it features 72 GPU cores. That's a lot of cores.

Past that, it's the first Tegra processor to have an onboard 4G LTE modem (finally!) .

Update by Artem: We had originally incorrectly specified that the Tegra 4 SoC has an LTE modem built-in. NVIDIA's press event sort of alluded to it, touting its improvements over previous Tegra generations, but, alas, that's not the case. Additionally, the wording in the press release, which referred to the modem as an "optional chipset" was misconstrued to be an optional component of the SoC. Here is the clarification provided by NVIDIA after we reached out to them via email:

Tegra 4’s LTE capability is offered via an optional chipset, the Icera i500. Yes, i500 is considered a separate modem. Technically the i500 modem is a chipset because it’s 2 chips – baseband and RF.

End of update.

NVIDIA has also tweaked the way the T4 renders photographs – by taking two shots at once and dropping them into a "computational photography engine," it effectively produces an HDR-quality shot instantly. That's neat stuff.

Of course, this is a Tegra chip we're talking about here, so you know it's going to bring mobile gaming to the next level. The T4 doesn't look like it's going to disappoint, as displayed by the new gameplay teaser for – get this – Dead Trigger 2. Hell yes!

Update: It looks like NVIDIA had something special up its sleeve this year – it announced a new pure Android-powered gaming device called Project SHEILD. This will be the first Tegra 4 device to hit the streets.

While the device is clearly designed for gaming, it's basically a small tablet with a built-in controller. Other details – like release date info – are scant for the time being, but we'll definitely keep you posted as more info about SHIELD and other T4 devices arises.

More Tegra 4 Info