It seemed that Nvidia is dead serious with their Tegra division. After being a top contender in ARM SoC market by having a number of smartphone and tablet manufacturers using their powerful Tegra 2 chip, Nvidia is not chilling out just yet, and have announced the next Tegra chip, which is a quad-core SoC.

Known as Kal-El internally, this will most likely turn into NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 as and when it’s ready to enter the consumer market. How powerful is this chip? Well, over at MWC 2011, a 2560 x 1440 stream was being decoded on a developmental device, scaled down to that slate’s native 1366 x 768 resolution, and additionally displayed on a connected 30-inch, 2560 x 1600 monitor. No signs of Kal-El struggling there. So the fact that Nvidia claims Kal-El to be five times more powerful than current Tegra 2 (double the processing power of Tegra 2 and triple the graphics-crunching prowess), and slightly more powerful than an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, is no joke.

Now if you think that the full dozen of GPU cores jogging in Kal-El will easily suck up whatever nuclear plant you power it up, Nvidia claims that things are much, much more efficient down there, with up to 12 hours of HD video playback are promised under the right circumstances.

Nvidia says that partners will be sampling the chip right now (apparently the chip is only 12 days old), and that August will see the companies unveiling products with this Kal-El guy, while smartphones will be available this Christmas and into the first half of next year. This is either NVIDIA over committing to an unrealistic future or the most aggressive schedule we’ve seen from an SoC vendor yet.