CES 2015 is in full swing and every company is trying to outshine their competitors’ products with their own awesome new innovations. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage at CES last night to unveil the company’s new mobile chip, the Tegra X1. With 256 processor cores and eight CPU cores, Huang claims it as the first mobile “superchip.” Mobile chip technology has come along in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years and Nividia may just have something special here.
The Tegra X1 succeeds last year’s K1 processor, and is built atop the Maxwell architecture, which is both fast and energy-efficient. Despite the fact that the crowd wasn’t overly excited, Huang said he was most excited about what the chip can do, saying that there’s nothing like it in the world. The new X1 will be able to handle 4K video at 60Hz, and is the first mobile chip to exceed 1 teraflop of throughput. Which is quite impressive as the first supercomputer to exceed a teraflop did so in 2000, and needed more than 1 million watts to pull it off.
Huang demonstrated the power of the Tegra X1 by showing off a real-time demo of Unreal Tournament. However, the chips strengths are being channeled into cars and not mobile phones as of yet. In the near term, the chip will power the new Drive CX “digital cockpit computer,” a fully-functioning infotainment system that could power an array of screens inside your car that monitor speed, temperature, and entertainment. Two X1s will power the Drive PX auto-pilot system that’s great for parking.
We may still have to wait a bit before Nvidia enters the smartphone market in full force, but they are doing some trailblazing work developing ultra powerful processors.
Source: TheVerge
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