Last night Nvidia held their CES 2014 press conference and as we mentioned in our lead-up article to this event, Nvidia was going to be bringing some mobile gaming news to the stage. As it turns out the company did just that with the announcement of the Tegra K1 chipset, or as they are calling it, a super chip.
The term super chip isn’t too far from the truth, at least when it comes to the mobile gaming scene. The Tegra K1 chip will be running an impressive 192 cores and is using Nvidia’s new Kepler architecture which just recently started making its appearance in some of their newer PC graphics cards.
There will be two available types of the Tegra K1 chip – a 32-bit quad-core (4-Plus-1 ARM Cortex-A15 CPU) running up to up to 2.3 GHz and a custom, NVIDIA-designed 64-bit dual Super Core CPU (dual Denver CPUs running up to 2.5 GHz). Regardless of what version a manufacturer selects for their future devices, both will be running the 192-core Kepler architecture.
This brings supports for all the latest gaming technology standards such as support for OpenGL 4.4. It was also announced that the Tegra K1 chip supports Epic’s next-gen game development engine, Unreal Engine 4.
Tegra K1 Features
New Gaming Standards
– 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 Creative Capabilities
– 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
New Efficiency Benchmarks
– 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.
This same technology is used in Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 780 Ti for PCs which is currently the fastest graphics card out for computers. This means some serious gaming horsepower will soon be available in mobile devices. This also means that 64-bit Android devices are on the horizon and Nvidia had some demos to play with at the event as well.
If you’re curious as to what happen to the Tegra 5 chip, this is actually that chip but the name has been changed to Tegra K1. So our guess regarding the announcement of a new chip by Nvidia the other day was spot on.
There was other news announced during the event outside of the realm of mobile gaming but in regards to what we were watching for, we definitely got some big news from Nvidia with the new Tegra K1 chip. We will be going for a much longer hands-on with this new chip and other goodies when we hit up Nvidia’s booth at CES 2014 in the next couple of days.
Nvidia has published a few blog posts as well regarding the Tegra K1 chip which we’ve linked below in case you’re curious and want to read more. The 32-bit Tegra K1 chips will begin showing up in devices in the first half of this year while the 64-bit version will begin arriving in devices in the second half of 2014.
So what do you think about this announcement and new Tegra K1 chip? Let us know in the comments below.
Official Website: Nvidia Tegra K1 | Tegra K1 and Unreal Engine 4
