The Asus Eee Pad Transformer officially arrived in the U.S. little over a month ago amid favorable reviews and decent sales, due in part to its attractive price point – it's the cheapest Honeycomb tablet – but also for its quality screen and optional keyboard dock. We had already heard about two other tablets from Asus coming in the next few months, the 10-inch Slider and 7-inch MeMo, but according to DigiTimes they are also working on their first quad-core tablet.
Details are scarce at the moment but according to the site's unnamed industry sources the device would be built around Nvidia's Tegra 3 (T30) quad-core processor, codenamed Kal El, and while no specific launch timeframe is given Nvidia has mentioned that products using the Tegra 3 SoC will be arriving as early as August 2011.
Billed as world's first quad-core mobile solution, Tegra 3 will feature four Cortex-A9 cores clocked at up to 1.5 GHz and twelve graphics cores, promising to double its predecessor's CPU performance and triple its graphics performance. Those increases are at least partially supported by the Coremark 1.0 results Nvidia shared, and the extra speed comes without raising the TDP, as Kal-El is more efficient than the Tegra 2.
DigiTimes says Asus is also expected to launch tablets running on CPUs from Intel – probably the tablet-centric 1.5GHz Atom Z670, which promises 1080p playback and long battery life. All in all it seems the company's tablet strategy will focus on targeting multiple segments of the market with various specs and form factors. Given the apparent early success seen with their first tablet we're definitely interested to see what's next.