LG is to power a series of smartphones with Nvidia's tablet-oriented dual-core Tegra 2 system-on-a-chip.

The handsets will join LG's Optimus family, the company said.

The first of them will launch in Q4, it added, though it gave no further details of the phones' pricing or specs.

Tegra 2 contains two 1GHz ARM A9 CPUs cores, plus an Nvidia GeForce graphics core and an H.264/VC-1/MPEG 4 1080p HD video engine.

LG's Optimus line runs Android, with the first model, the GT540, available now.

That suggests the Tegra 2 may well appear in a future Android phone, but don't forget that LG has said it will push out the Windows Phone 7-based Optimus 7 during Q4, so that's undoubtedly a candidate too. How much graphical horsepower does that fancy Microsoft UI require, we wonder? ®