Nvidia is announcing on Wednesday that it is ready with its Tegra 3 chip, previously known by its Kal-El code name. However, the first device running the chip, Asus’ Eee Pad Transformer Prime, won’t be shipping until December.

The Asus tablet is set to go on sale for $499 for a 32 gigabyte model and $100 more for a 64GB version, with the optional plug-in keyboard dock priced at $149. Despite some hopes it would ship with Google’s new Ice Cream Sandwich edition of Android, the tablet will initially come loaded with Android 3.2. An upgrade should be available in December, Asus said.

As for Nvidia’s chip, the company claims it will offer three times the graphic performance while offering 61 percent more battery life — meaning up to 12 hours of HD video playback on a single charge. The Tegra 3 name will come as no surprise to AllThingsD readers, as CEO Jen-Hsun Huang used it on stage at AsiaD. Asus CEO Jonney Shih also showed off the Transformer Prime during his appearance at our Hong Kong conference.

Although touted as a quad-core processor, the chip also includes a fifth processing core that can be used in place of the four main cores to run devices in a lower power state. Phones running the chip, along with more tablets, are due next year.

Nvidia first announced its plans for Kal-El at Mobile World Congress back in February.

The company, naturally, isn’t stopping with Tegra 3. Its road map shows a chip code-named Wayne due next year, with roughly double the performance; follow-on chips “Logan” and “Stark” are due in 2013 and 2014, respectively, and promise logarithmically better performance.

When is a quad-core chip not a quad-core chip?

The answer, it was revealed on Tuesday, is when it is Nvidia’s forthcoming Kal-El processor. Although the chip does indeed pack four main processing cores, Nvidia noted today that it also harbors a low-power single-core processor that can be turned on in place of the four main cores when power consumption is the most critical factor. The fifth core runs at a lower frequency than the other four, the company said in a technical paper it posted to its Web site on Tuesday.

“The companion core is used primarily when the mobile device is in active standby and performing background tasks such as Email syncs, Twitter updates, Facebook updates etc.,” Nvidia said in the paper.

The approach aims to address one of the challenges of the smartphone and tablet markets. While there is clearly demand for ever more processing power for things like gaming and augmented reality, these are also portable devices that have no utility once they run out of battery power. In a second paper, Nvidia also talks about how, even though it packs more cores, a quad-core chip can actually be used to consume less power than a dual-core chip.

Nvidia first talked about Kal-El back at February’s Mobile World Congress and said it would arrive later this year. A YouTube video from earlier this year shows the processor in action.

Rival Qualcomm has said it also plans to have a quad-core chip, though not until next year.

The biggest unknown is price, which went unmentioned during the demo. My assumption is that Palm would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. ‘Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,’ he asked, then walked away.”

– Peter Kafka, MediaMemo

CEOs and Palm evangelists convinced that Palm’s new Pre handset is anything more than table stakes at the handset poker game would do well to consider two bits of Apple (AAPL) news and rumor that suggest Cupertino may be hard at work on a next-generation handset capable of mercilessly beating all others into sobbing submission.

The first: A rumor that iPhone 3.0 will support quad-core processors destined for an upcoming iPhone hardware revision. If this proves true and Apple (AAPL) does release a multi-core GPU iPhone–which is not as much of a stretch as you might think–it would likely support features we’re more accustomed to seeing on the PC. And as The Apple Core’s Jason O’Grady notes, “It would slaughter pretty much every portable gaming platform on the market.”

The second: Apple has applied for a patent on a behind-screen camera that could capture images “while the display elements are in an inactive state (in which the display elements are darkened and at least partially transparent).” It doesn’t take much of a leap to see that technology brought to bear on a next-gen iPhone and the long rumored iChat AV Mobile.

Those are two potential killer features for a device that already has three things the Pre does not: a maturing platform, a thriving developer ecosystem and a market leading music player and store. Are they just rumor and speculation? For now, certainly. But given the pace of innovation in the mobile industry, and more specifically, at Apple–where the multi-touch phone that Palm (PALM) is now aping originated two years ago–they’re not beyond the realm of possibility, are they?