President and CEO of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang, has confirmed in an interview with Forbes that quad-core chips will in fact be arriving to tablets before the year is up. Their quad-core Tegra 3 chips, also referred to as “Kal-El” will soon be powering the most advanced tablets on the planet.

Back in early May we speculated that NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core chips might arrive as early as September and the new Amazon tablets might be the first to come equipped with one. Well the Tegra 3 won’t be arriving this month and we still don’t know what the first slate to sport one will be, but it’s reassuring to know the super fast chips will be arriving before 2012.

Currently NVIDIA is known for producing chips for Android-based tablets, Android smartphones as well as other high-end smartphones. They produce chips for 70% of Android tablets currently on the market. This accounts for 30% of the tablet market as a whole that use NVIDIA chips. It seems NVIDIA is not overly concerned about competition either.

Jen-Hsun Huang states:

[blockquote color=’#0088cc’]We’re the only people seriously on the dance floor with Qualcomm, …We’re really the only two active players[/blockquote]

As far as Tegra 3 powered smartphones are concerned, we likely won’t see them surface until some point during 2012, but of course they are on the way as well.

Right now NVIDIA profits more from their Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) business which at the moment generates $4.5 billion annually while their smartphone and tablet PC chips rake in about $2 billion, less than half. However, Jen-Hsun Huang gathers that the tables will turn by 2015, predicting that global sales for their mobile chips will reach or exceed $20 billion while their GPU business will become their 2nd largest grossing sector generating roughly $7 billion in annual sales.

A lot of good things are brewing at NVIDIA and the future continues to look bright for them, especially while the tablet PC industry continues to take off. Many of us are anxious to find out what tablet PC manufacturer will be the first to equip their device with a fancy new and ultra-fast quad-core chip but we will all find out sooner than later by the sound of it. Whatever the case Jen-Hsun Huang and NVIDIA are highly determined to be the first company to release a quad-core chip for mobile devices and it’s fair to say that they probably will be.

Anyone here looking forward to a quad-core powered Android tablet? I know I am!