The Sony Xperia Z and Xperia ZL stole the show at this year’s CES, but one of the highlights of the event was also the announcement of the Nvidia Tegra 4 SoC, featuring four cores (plus a companion core) based on ARM’s latest Cortex A15 technology, and a 72-core GPU (!). As was the case with Tegra 3, I was hoping for a lot of OEM’s flagship devices to feature the Tegra 4 processor to kick off the year, but unfortunately, we won’t be seeing Tegra 4-powered devices for at least half a year, if not longer.

During a conference call with financial analysts, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang that the company will be ramping up production now, but the Tegra 4 SoC will ship to customers only in July. This “delay” will definitely hit home, as this will also push the release of the highly-anticipated Nvidia Shield gaming device, which will likely be made publicly available only in September.

After Tegra 3 was completely overshadowed by the Samsung Exynos 4412 processor and the Qualcomm SnapDragon S4/S4 Pro processors, Nvidia was hoping to turn things around in 2013. But the company hasn’t been off to the best start, even if Android-unknown HP are said to release an Android tablet and a few smartphones powered by Tegra 4.

Even with the amazing specifications, at least on paper, the Tegra 4 has already hit a rough patch, with Qualcomm calling out the SoC as “underperforming.” Another report is stating that not many device manufacturers have placed orders for NVIDIA’s Tegra 4. With the imminent release of the Qualcomm SnapDragon 800 and the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa, things might just get even harder.

Of course, benchmark and performance comparisons are what will be the deciders in the end! But a late release certainly doesn’t help the cause.

What are your thoughts? Are you disappointed by the late release of the Nvidia Tegra 4-powered devices, and especially the Shield? Who do you think is going to come out on top in the processor wars?