NVIDIA Tegra X1 Announced

NVIDIA Tegra X1 Announced With 1 Teraflop of Computing Power

NVIDIA today announced its latest mobile chip offering – Tegra X1. The Tegra X1 is the first next-generation mobile chipset to have been announced this year. The main highlight of this new chip is its one teraflops of processing power. That makes it the single most powerful mobile chipset to have been announced yet, and brings truly desktop class performance to mobile devices.

The Tegra X1 chipset is based on the NVIDIA Maxwell GPU architecture that the company uses for its desktop class GPUs, including the current top-of-the-line GeForce GTX 980 desktop GPU. The NVIDIA Tegra K1 chip used on the Google Nexus 9 and the NVIDIA shield was already a beast performance wise, but this new X1 chip offers twice the performance of its predecessor. The Tegra X1 features a 256-core Maxwell GPU and 8 CPU cores (4x Cortex-A57 + 4x Cortex-A53), Instead of the more common big.LITTLE cluster migration used on Samsung Exynos and also the upcoming Snapdragon 810 chip, NVIDIA is using its own unique system. It also includes supports for Ultra HD 4K video recording at 60 fps and camera throughput up to 1.3 gigapixel. The chip is manufactured on a 20nm process, like the Apple A8 chipset and the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chipset.

The chipset has been announced for use in embedded products, mobile devices, autonomous machines and also cars. NVIDIA claims that the Tegra X1 chip has more power than the fastest supercomputer from 15 years back, ASCI Red. The ASCI Red was the world’s first computer to boast of 1 teraflops computing horsepower. The Tegra X1 matches its performance while being the size of a thumbnail and a low power draw of just under 10 watts. The Tegra X1 also supports all major graphics standards, including Unreal Engine 4, DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5, CUDA, OpenGL ES3.1 and Android Extension Pack.

Unfortunately, the Tegra X1 chip doesn’t come with an integrated modem. This may limit its usage on smartphones, just like the previous Tegra chipsets. So while we may expect to see an NVIDIA Tegra X1 chip powered Android tablet to be launched this year, it doesn’t seem very likely that we will see a flagship smartphone powered with this chip. There is also the question of power requirements as currently we only have the official numbers given out by NVIDIA to go by. The Tegra K1 last year had an unusually high power requirement for a mobile chip, which made it unsuitable for smartphones. Hopefully that issue will not affect the Tegra X1 and we finally see a smartphone powered by this beast of a chipset this year.