With over 1 Teraflops, the NVIDIA Tegra X1 is here to power up mobile devices, and drive the path to a future of smart cars.
CES 2015 is off to a great start as NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang reveals the company’s new Tegra X1 chip. Based on the Maxwell architecture, the Tegra X1 has twice the performance of the Tegra K1 and is also two times more energy efficient (according to GFXBench 3.0). It’s the world’s first 1 teraflops mobile chip that is a 256-core GPU plus 8-core CPU combo; in Jen-Hsun’s own words, it’s a mobile super chip.
“Huh what, I don’t understand. English please?”
Okay, so what it means for us is that with the Tegra X1, games that normally run on a PC architecture now have the potential of bringing that PC experience to mobile platforms! During the press conference, Jen-Hsun showcased a simulated demo of a smartphone rendering a video made using Unreal Engine 4 called “Elemental”.
Of course, that is not all there is to the story. The Jun-Hsun also envisions the Tegra X1 as the beginning of NVIDIA’s role as the brains of a car, in what he calls the company’s new “Digital Cockpit Computer”. It’s going to be powered by the Tegra X1 chip and is able to process 16.6-megapixels, which is the equivalent of four HD or two 4K displays at 60Hz. These might not be widely available in the immediate future, but surely we’ll see in within the decade, if not sooner.
The rest of the conference consisted of demos and explanation on the new Drive CX and Drive PX, both new platforms that are meant to empower future on-board digital solutions in automotives.
