Kepler Based Nvidia Tegra K1 All Set to Stir Up the Android World

 

Not long back, Nvidia unveiled the Tegra K1 SOC which marks a paradigm shift in mobile GPU field. For people who aren’t up to date about the desktop world, Kepler is an Nvidia GPU architecture used in its GTX-600 graphics cards that replaced the Fermi architecture. It brought with it many changes that significantly improved thermal and power characteristics. Now Nvidia plans to bring that goodness to the mobile industry too.

Tegra K1 will be based on a modified version of the Kepler with 1 SMX unit, which equates to 192 processing cores (CUDA cores to be exact). That is a significant step up from the 72 core Gforce ULP based Tegra 4. This could mean huge performance improvements in the graphics department and is a very welcome advancement for the Android based gaming consoles.

Tegra K1 is planned to be paired with a quad core ARM Cortex A15 processor with a low power companion core for better efficiency. Later on, a dual core Denver based version is expected which will bring full ARM v8 64-bit support. Both versions are also expected to be pin compatible, hence enabling OEMs to release various versions of the same device without much work.

The Cortex A15 version will be available during the first half of 2014, followed by the Denver version in the second half. Early benchmarks seem to show great promise as the SOC outperforms all competition with ease. Qualcomm, however, was quick to point out that since the tests were performed on a yet to be announced all-in-one desktop platform, it doesn’t paint the entire picture. They say that the thermal constraints of a mobile environment would make those results unachievable in a real world scenario. They really could be right, since Nvidia’s promise of laptop grade graphics at a fraction of it’s power consumption seems too good to be true for now.

Either way, we have an exciting year ahead of us and can see some superb hardware soon. Lets just hope that this spec war doesn’t turn out like it did with the PC industry!

Source: The Inquirer

Via: XDA Developers

Image Credits: Pinoytutorial