Lenovo readies 10.1 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet with Tegra 3

So far Asus remains the only company to officially announce a Tegra 3 based tablet but it looks like Lenovo will be joining the fray soon. According to a report on Engadget, the Chinese manufacturer is readying a new 10.1-inch tablet equipped with Nvidia's quad-core processor as well as Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

The yet-to-be-named device will reportedly sport 2GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM, a standard USB host socket covered by a pop-out flap, a back-facing camera of unknown resolution with an LED flash, a "Special Fusion-Skin Body" and a fingerprint scanner on the backside that apparently doubles as an optical joystick. There's no information the dimensions and weight of the new tablet but Engadget speculates it will be significantly thinner than the IdeaPad K1.

The device is expected to hit the market before the end of the year -- though it's not clear if that launch window is for the company's home country of China or elsewhere.

Other tablet manufacturers, including HTC and Acer, are also expected to announce Tegra 3 and ICS powered tablets during the CES and Mobile World Congress shows early next year. There are no details on HTC's device at this point other than the possibility that it will be joined by a quad-core smartphone. As for Acer's tablet, all that's been said is it will reportedly launch as the A510 -- an obvious successor to the Iconia Tab A500 sporting a similar design.

Nvidia posts third-quarter results, talks up Tegra 3

Nvidia reported revenue of $1.07 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2012 ended October 30, 2011, up 4.9% from the prior quarter and 26.3% from $843.9 million in the same period last year. Higher revenues were driven by a 9.5% sales increase in the firm's professional solutions unit, which includes Quadro graphics cards for workstations and Tesla supercomputing processors, as well as a 14% sequential increase in sales of chips for smartphones and tablets.

When it came to its consumer focused discrete GPU business, sales only rose 1% quarter over quarter, while it lost some share to AMD in the notebook GPU segment. Nevertheless, the company believes a new cycle of revival for PC gaming products is at hand because PC graphics are racing ahead of the five or six-year-old game consoles on the market.

On the profitability front, gross margin rose slightly to 52.2% from 51.7% in the fiscal second quarter. The company reported a net income in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) of $178.3 million, or 29 cents per diluted share, up 17.6% from the previous quarter and 110% from the year-ago quarter.

During the earnings conference call with analysts, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang talked up the company’s Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor, but also noted its disappointment that the company lost a design win with the new Motorola smartphones as well as Amazon's Kindle Fire -- both of which have gone with TI's OMAP processors. He still noted that Tegra processors are currently found on eleven smartphones and twenty-three tablets.

Nvidia said it expects sales for the current quarter to be roughly flat sequentially, plus or minus 2 percent. This means the company's revenue could be between $1.05 billion and $1.09 billion, in line with analysts' expectations.