A slide supposedly containing information about Nvidia's Batman-themed Tegra 4 "Wayne" SoC has surfaced, revealing that the chip will sport a 72-core GPU and support Ultra HD video. The slide made its first appearance on the China-based Chiphell forum thanks to a user called Xenomorph.
According to the specs, Nvidia's Tegra 4 may be a quad-core 28-nm chip using the 4-PLUS-1 architecture like the previous Tegra 3 SoC – the +1 is what the company calls the "patented battery-saver core". There's speculation that these cores will be based on ARM's latest Cortex-A15 design although the slide doesn't mention anything about the baseline design.
As previously stated, the processor cores will be partnered with 72 GPU (GeForce) cores that will support a display resolution up to 2560 x 1600 @ 120 Hz. The output rendering will thus be six times that of the current Tegra 3, and twenty times that of the older Tegra 2 chip. The Ultra HD aspect is likely related to the max video output through an HDMI connection.
The slide goes on to reveal that the Wayne SoC will support DDR3L, LPDDR2 and LPDDR3 dual channel memory, USB 3.0, and security features like HDCP, Secure Boot and DRM. ZDNet points out that Apple's current A6X SoC which powers the new iPad 4 is around 4 times faster than the Tegra 3, so this new Wayne chip should put the heat on Apple when it makes a likely appearance next month during CES 2013.
