NVidia has kicked off the new year by announcing the latest iteration of their mobile processor, the NVidia Tegra X1. And right from the get go, it’s already turning some heads with its eight-core 64-bit setup with 256-core GPU based on the company’s Maxwell architecture.
Based on its specs sheet, NVidia’s new “œsuper-chip” comprises of four Cortex-A57 processing cores with 2MB L2 Cache and another quartet of Cortex-A53 cores with 512KB L2 Cache. However, instead of using the typical ARM big.LITTLE implementation, NVidia chose to use their own cache-coherent cluster switching and custom interconnect which, in theory, should provide better performance with lesser energy consumption.
Speaking of performance-to-power ratio, NVidia demonstrated the Tegra X1’s prowess by running the Unreal Engine 4 “œElemental” demo by only 10 watts of power. To put things in perspective, the Xbox One needed 100 watts to run the same demo, while earlier Kepler-based GPU need at least 300 watts to run it.
The company was also keen to point out that apart from having a peak floating point performance of 1 teraflop, the NVidia Tegra X1 also supports all major graphics standards which includes CUDA, DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5 and ES 3.1, as well as Unreal Engine 4.
NVidia Tegra X1 GPU specs:
Process: TSMC 20nm SoC
Architecture: Maxwell
CUDA Cores: 256
Compute Performance: 1 TFLOP
Engine Clock: up to 1000MHz
Memory Clock: 1600MHz LPDDR4
Memory Bus Width: 64-bit
Bandwidth: 25.6Gbps
16 Texture Units, 16 ROP Units
Supported Technologies: CUDA, DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.5 and ES 3.1, as well as Unreal Engine 4
Video Decode: up to 2160p @ 60fps
Video Encode: up to 2160p @ 30fps
Supports up to 2160p display @ 60Hz
Supports HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 (4K @ 60fps) video output
Apart from smartphones and tablets, NVidia also has its eyes set on the automotive industry with Tegra X1. The company highlighted the importance of its new mobile processor to the success of the newly-announced NVidia Drive platform and its two key components (Drive PX and Drive CX).
The first batch of smartphones and tablets which will run on the new NVidia Tegra X1 are expected to make its debut in the first half of the year. Tegra X1-powered cars, on the other hand, are expected to be unveiled on the latter half of the year.