Hurrah. Quad-core Androids are now a reality, thanks to NVIDIA and its Tegra 3 processor. Announced back in November, this chip seems to have already infiltrated the tablet market. Now we’re anxiously awaiting some quad core smart phones, and hope to see such devices put on a good showing at the MWC later this month, Even just seeing models like the HTC One X would be great, however, it will be even better when we see these devices hit retail shelves. NVIDIA just delivered an earnings call to investors, where it had some good news about just this subject.

According to NVIDIA, the first batch of quad core Tegra 3 Android phones will begin shipping sometime this quarter. As of now, we don’t know how many devices NVIDIA is talking about, but the news that we won’t have to wait until summer to see the first arrival is still extremely good news.

One other bit of interesting news to come out the earnings call is that work on a new system-on-a-chip that will integrate 3G and LTE radios, hopefully reducing power consumption.

We can expect to see both quad and dual core versions of this component arrival; NVIDIA says that this could happen sometime later this year. It isn’t clear just how NVIDIA will market the new chips, but for now, this project is under the codename Grey.