NVIDIA has announced the Tegra X1 “mobile super chip” today. The X1 is the first mobile chip to achieve a teraflop of computing power as claimed by co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. That made it just as fast as the world’s fastest supercomputer in 2000.
Tegra X1 is built on the same NVIDIA Maxwell(TM) GPU architecture rolled out only months ago for the world’s top-performing gaming graphics card, the GeForce(R) GTX 980. The 256-core Tegra X1 provides twice the performance of its predecessor, the Tegra K1, which is based on the previous-generation Kepler(TM) architecture and debuted at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show.
Tegra processors are built for embedded products, mobile devices, autonomous machines and automotive applications. Tegra X1 will begin appearing in the first half of the year.
To prove just how capable the X1 can be, Huang showed the Unreal Engine 4 “Elemental” demo running off of the chip. That’s a graphically complex 3D scene that’s been used to show off the rising computational capability of video cards and consoles over the past few years.
Nvidia also announced the Nvidia Drive PX, an “auto-pilot car computer” powered by a pair of Tegra X1s. Used in conjunction with up to 12 separate HD cameras, a car with the Drive PX can build an “environment model” that it can use to “see” and “understand” its surroundings—it can supposedly detect other vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists, road signs, and other information.
NVIDIA seems well-poised to take on Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 810 chip when the X1 starts hitting devices in the first half of this year.
