It sheds the newer Cortex-A15 architecture of the Tegra 4 for a spruced-up 2.3GHz Cortex-A9 with the i500 LTE modem built directly into the chip die -- a move that cuts the surface area in half and simplifies the hardware, even as it supposedly outruns equivalent competition.

ENGADGET

Of course others like Wi2Wi, have integrated the Marvell WiFi die with Bluetooth for their own single-chip solutions.

ENGADGET: iFixit digs deeper into iPod touch Bluetooth mystery -- discovers 802.11a

While that measure is expected to die in the Senate, congressional Republicans do have the leverage to chip away at funding for the law and are expected to win some Democratic votes for peeling back unpopular provisions of it.

WSJ: Judge Sides With Virginia on Health Law

Believe it or not, it was back in 2006 that the chipmaker first started talking about its "new class of x86 processors" and the idea of an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) -- a chip that would combine a CPU and a fairly powerful ATI GPU onto the same die.

ENGADGET: HP Pavilion dm1z (with AMD Fusion) review