A Look at NVIDIA’s Most Ambitious SoC Yet: Tegra K1

NVIDIA impressed at CES 2013 with the unveiling of its Tegra 4 processor, and as is now super-clear, it wanted to blow people’s socks off at the latest event. With Tegra K1, NVIDIA caters to gamers, developers, and believe it or not, car manufacturers. Let’s investigate and find out just what it brings to the table.

Going into this CES, I had anticipated that NVIDIA would announce its Tegra 4 successor – as this article suggests, it has. What I didn’t expect, however, was to be overwhelmed with the sheer amount of impressive tech that NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang talked about over the course of his 90 minute presentation.

Just the other night, I mentioned to someone that mobile processor advancements are hitting us at as rapid a pace as what we saw on the desktop side a decade ago. Actually, the current pace of mobile development is undoubtedly faster.

In 2010, NVIDIA’s dual-core Tegra 2 was introduced, while in 2011, the quad-core Tegra 3 was. At last year’s CES, the company showed off an impressive evolution, Tegra 4, which featured a then-staggering 72 CUDA cores. Given the naming scheme we’ve seen up to this point, it was assumed “Tegra 5″ would be the chip getting announced at this CES – but not so. As Jen-Hsun stated, Tegra K1 is a major advancement; to call it “Tegra 5″ would be inappropriate. “It’s simply not linear.“

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