Xiaomi M3 with quad-core Tegra 4, 2.5GB RAM, 1080p display

It’s here, folks. The next generation of smartphone specs is arriving in the form of faster processors and larger displays. Popular Chinese brand Xiaomi is rumored to be releasing a smartphone with some crazy hardware. We’re talking a quad-core Tegra 4 chip, 2.5GB of RAM, and a 1080p display. We should be seeing devices like this in the next few months anyway, but for now, let’s admire what have here.

Early reports have the Xiaomi M3 pegged for a mid-2013 launch, and more recent reports have unveiled some of the alleged innards of the new device, such as a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 4 chip, which has yet to be announced obviously, but it’s said that it will be capable of clocking in between 1.8GHz and 2.0GHz.

The rumored M3 is also said to receive a larger 4.5-inch display with a 1080p resolution, which would result in a crazy pixel density of 490 PPI, blowing past HTC’s DROID DNA that has a pixel density of 440 PPI. There will also be a 12MP rear camera, and it will run Android 4.2 Jelly Bean with MIUI.

Unfortunately, don’t expect these Xiaomi handset to ever make there way stateside, but we can certainly expect similar high-end smartphones to hit the market next year. Of course, these are all just mumblings for now, but it’s definitely no surprise that we’ll see these kinds of phones soon, and maybe CES 2013 will have some on display. Stay tuned.

NVIDIA's next superhero-themed mobile chipset has possibly made an early appearance in a leaked side in China, and it looks like it wants to go toe-to-toe with the latest processors from Samsung and Qualcomm. The Tegra 4 (codenamed Wayne) will apparently offer the same power-efficient 28nm process found on its Snapdragon rival and according to the slide from Chip Hell, there's a dizzying 72-core graphics setup. That's six times as many GPU cores as Tegra 3 -- the processor found in the Nexus 7, for example -- and the increase is claimed to result in six times the overall visual performance. Those graphics cores will be able to feed displays of up to 2,560 x 1600, with 1080p output at 120Hz, while the leak also mentions 4K -- if only in passing. There's no increase in CPU cores this time, with the same 4-plus-1 setup , but we are seeing its move to ARM's latest design, the Cortex-A15. Tegra 4 will apparently also catch up with USB 3.0, being NVIDIA's first mobile chip to do so, alongside dual-channel DDR3L memory. We've reached out to chipmaker and we'll let you know when we hear more, but it's highly likely we'll be welcoming this next-generation processor early next year -- say, at a certain mobile trade show.