NVIDIA has announced the Tegra 4 chipset, which combines an NVIDIA GPU with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU.

According to ARM, the Cortex-A15 delivers around twice the performance of the Cortex-A9, used in Tegra 3, and is able to address up to 1TB of RAM.

The Tegra 4 GPU has 72 cores, compared to 12 cores on Tegra 3.

In addition, NVIDIA is including what it calls “Computational Photography Architecture” which uses both CPU and GPU to improve photographic capability.

The part of the announcement that most caught my eye though is the claim of “up to 45 percent less power than its predecessor, Tegra 3, in common use cases”.

Tegra 4 will enable high-performance smartphones, but I am more interested in what this and other next-generation chipsets will offer for tablets. Microsoft’s Surface RT would be more compelling with Tegra 4, rather than its current Tegra 3, since it suffers from poor performance in some cases (Excel, for example) and longer battery life would do no harm either.

There will be even less reason to want a laptop.

NVIDIA’s newly announced Project SHIELD gaming portable also uses a Tegra 4 chipset.