Nvidia unveils first teraflop mobile chip with the Tegra X1 #CES2015
Nvidia Corporation co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took to the stage at CES tonight to reveal the chip maker’s newest mobile product: the Tegra X1. This chip, modelled after the Maxwell GPU for desktop PCs, he claims is the first mobile GPU capable of reaching a teraflop of computing power. Making the Tegra XI, he says, as powerful as the world’s fastest supercomputer in 2000.
The Tegra X1 is indeed a powerhouse, packing in an eight-core 64-bit CPU and 256 GPU cores, designed to deliver twice the performance of Nvidia’s Tegra K1 mobile chip, which was released last year.
Engadget reports that in order to show off the performance of the chip, Huang showed the Unreal Engine 4 “Elemental” demo running on the Tegra X1. However, many sites are reporting that while the chip capably ran the demo, it did so at demonstrably lower framerate and visual quality than current gen PC chips. As a mobile chip, however, it’s hard to expect it to stand up to desktop power.
Huang also mentioned that efficiency is key to the construction of the Tegra X1 and it is able to run the Elemental demo at just 10 watts of power. This is compared to the Xbox One, which needs 100 watts and over two years ago, a leading Nvidia GPU needed 300 watts of power.
Not just for mobile, Tegra X1 is headed to automotive
Nvidia is pressing its advantage by stretching out from mobile to automotive with the Tegra X1 as well and it will serve as the core of the Drive CX platform.
The Drive CX platform is an outwardly beautiful user interface for vehicles that integrates a powerful operating system, excellent display, and autonomous car technology. The platform boasts 2.3 teraflops of processing power to gather data from cameras set around a vehicle to allow it to auto-navigate roads.
Nvidia also claims that Drive CX will include a “neural network” feature that will use the power of the Tegra X1 chip to learn to discern and identify other cars based on make.
Image credit: Nvidia Corporation, Tegra X1 mobile chip
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