NVIDIA's Tegra 2 processors are finally beginning to infiltrate handsets, but today the company announced plans to include a quad-core CPU in devices later this year. Currently being referred to as "Kal-El," the super new system-on-a-chip is said to be capable of five times the processing power of a Tegra 2 and could begin arriving in tablets as soon as August and smartphones by the end of 2011 under the Tegra 3 name. Kal-El will also reportedly sport a 12-core GPU and be able to put out an "Extreme HD" image at a resolution of 2560x1600. Things don't end there, though, as NVIDIA plans to release even more powerful chips codenamed Wayne, Logan, and Stark in the coming years.

We've always known that mobile tech was progressing quickly, but this news out of NVIDIA is pretty crazy. We've already seen the Tegra 2 make Android devices run like butter, but the Tegra 3 looks like it'll take things even further and help up the ante in mobile gaming. With all of this horsepower, you wouldn't be crazy to expect a battery life of around five minutes, but NVIDIA is promising that the new chips will be extremely power-efficient. So, has the announcement of Kal-El made devices like the Atrix 4G and DROID Bionic lose a bit of their luster before they're even launched?