NVIDIA announces 192-core Tegra K1 processor
192 cores? You read that right. NVIDIA could have settled for just eight, maybe even twelve, but is that really pushing the envelop? Nah. Instead we have the Tegra K1, announced tonight at a private press event in Las Vegas as part of the kickoff to this year’s CES.
It’s not Tegra 5. NVIDIA sees at as a non-linear progression from previous Tegra chips. The K1 combines the heart of GeForce with the soul of Tesla, according to bossman Jen-Hsun Huang. The chipset is based on Kepler architecture, a departure from previous Tegra chips. This is the same technology that encompasses top-of-the-line chips found in high performance gaming PCs. NVIDIA is pushing the chip as a gaming platform, believing Android can disrupt consoles in the same way it affected smartphones, tablets, and personal computers.
Tegra K1 is aimed at bridging the gap for game developers, making it easy to create content for both mobile and console/PC devices. NVIDIA is partnering with Epic Games to bring the Unreal Engine 4 to the new Tegra K1 platform in an effort to solve this problem. An example:
In reality, the bulk of the chip’s 192 cores belong to the GPU. Parsing the processor down to it’s true form, the K1 will come in two flavors: one based on the 32-bit four-plus-one core Cortex A15 CPU and another version based on the Denver CPU, which is a 64-bit dual-core processor based on ARMv8. The chip promises GPU performance 1.5 times more efficient than any other on the market.
[via NVIDIA]