Nvidia on Thursday said a quad-core Tegra 3 chip and a third-party LTE modem will be used in the Fujitsu Arrows X LTE phone, which will come to Japan in "summer." A company spokesperson could not provide a specific date, and further details of the smartphone were not immediately available.

Nvidia's own Icera 410 LTE modem was also approved for use on the AT&T wireless network in the U.S., paving the way for smartphones with quad-core chips and LTE modems.

Nvidia and Qualcomm are the only companies that offer a package of quad-core processors and LTE modems for smartphones, but the technologies have not yet been paired. For example, HTC's One X smartphone is offered with a quad-core processor in the non-LTE variant, but with a dual-core processor in the LTE variant. ZTE offers the Ascend D Quad smartphone with a quad-core processor, but the handset does not support LTE.

LTE will offer fast download speeds and quicker access to websites, and quad-core chips speed up smartphone performance. But there have been troubles matching the two technologies together, with one of the issues being smartphone battery life, said Jim McGregor, an industry analyst.

"When you add more cores, you should be able to do things faster and shut down cores. That's theoretically," McGregor said. "But the minute 4G kicks in, it's the same old theory: You run something faster, you're going to run out of power."