NVIDIA had a rough year last year struggling to compete with Qualcomm's monster successes in the mobile world. This year they are coming out with guns blazing though. Late yesterday they had a pre-CES event in which they announced their new Tegra K1 mobile architecture. It's not the Tegra 5, which will come later, but is more of a jump-start bridge to hit the ground running fast and hard this year. The new Tegra K1 boasts some very impressive advances, including a new 192-core GPU. The CPU for this architecture will come in two flavors: one is a 32-bit four-plus-one core using a Cortex A15 CPU, and the other is a 64-bit dual-core processor using an ARMv8 CPU.
The GPU is being touted as the "fastest on the planet," and boasts speeds that are 1.5 times that of current mobile GPU tech. It uses elements from NVIDIA's famed Kepler architecture for the desktop. Here's a press statement with more of the details,
It looks like NVIDIA is working hard to get back in the race. We look forward to seeing what they can come up with throughout 2014! Here's the full press release at the source link below.Tegra K1 is the first mobile chip to feature the NVIDIA Kepler architecture that powers the fastest graphics card on the planet, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti. For the first time, next-generation PC gaming will now be available on mobile platforms.
Tegra K1 is offered in two pin-to-pin compatible versions - a 32-bit quad-core (4-Plus-1 ARM Cortex-A15 CPU) and a custom, NVIDIA-designed 64-bit dual Super Core CPU. This CPU (codenamed “Project Denver”) delivers very high single-thread and multi-thread performance. Both versions deliver stunning graphics and visual computing capabilities powered by the 192-core NVIDIA Kepler GPU.
With Tegra K1, users will experience:
New Gaming Standards
New Creative Capabilities
- Full support for the latest PC-class gaming technologies – including DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.4 and tessellation - enabling it to run the world’s most advanced game engine, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4
- The same graphics features as next-gen gaming consoles (Xbox One, PS 4) and faster performance vs. current gen consoles (Xbox 360, PS 3)
New Efficiency Benchmarks
- Advanced computation capabilities to speed applications for computer vision and speech recognition
- Support for NVIDIA CUDA – the world’s most pervasive parallel computing platform – enabling computer vision, advanced imaging, speech recognition, video editing and more
- Breakthrough energy efficiency, more so than any other mobile GPU at the same power level
- Kepler is the world’s fastest and most energy-efficient GPU architecture, powering all 10 of the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers
Source: NVIDIA