May 4, 2011 09:54 GMT  ·  By

The NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC (system-on-chip) may be present in quite the myriad of tablets, which are or are not already selling, but it looks like the successor to this platform is going to get to work soon enough.

When Intel and NVIDIA started that litigation over the right to make chipsets for x86 processors, the latter was essentially locked out of the motherboard business.

Then, the ARM architecture began to spawn strong enough processors for the nascent tablet market, and NVIDIA seized at the chance.

The result was the Tegra series of SoCs, and while the first-generation chip wasn't that impressive, the Tegra 2 landed in quite the number of electronics.

During February, it became known that the Santa Clara, California-based GPU maker had, in fact, already established the roadmap for Tegra 2 successors.

The Kal-El is the Tegra 3 and is expected to be about five times as fast as Tegra 2, this being enough food for imagination already.

Not much is known about this tribute to a certain Kryptonian than the fact that it has four ARM cores.

Now, a report on Digitimes says that ASUS has already decided to make a Kal-El-powered slate, although no other information is known about it, not specifically anyway.

Instead, it is said that a 10-inch Eee Pad Slider EP102 and the 7-inch Eee Pad MeMo EP7, based on Tegra 2 and a Qualcomm CPU, respectively, will precede it, scheduled for launch in the next three months.

Considering that the target shipment figure for the company is of two million, it makes sense that ASUS would try to have new and better models on hand as soon as possible.

In the meantime, prospective buyers can fill the void with such things as the Eee Pad Transformer, although that too is suffering from unavailability, what with the component shortages.