Nvidia Tegra K1! Super computer in your mobile device.

I was honestly not expecting anything truly special to come out of 2014 in terms of ground breaking progress in my industry but of course Nvidia had to go and pull this stunt. During CES 2014, Nvidia came out and revealed their new Tegra processor. Basically Tegra is the most powerful mobile processor on the market boasting a quad core processor that was previously inconceivable. I was expecting the new line of Tegras to be more of a suped up Tegra 4 with a faster quad core processor and that could handle maybe some limited DirectX11 features. Instead we got the K1.

This chip is so powerful that Nvidia does not consider it a successor to the Tegra 4. In fact this processor is not 4, not 8, not even 12 cores but 192! That is the muscle of a super computer that you leave remotely in some silo in silicon valley. This is a revolutionary piece of hardware! Nvidia was able to pack all this power into one mobile chip using the keplar architecture which was previously only used on super computers. You can basically do anything you want graphically on a tablet if it's powered by one of these things. Epic Games  has actually set up their Unreal 4 engine to work with this chip and were able to see all of their brand new feature sets that we were drooling over last year on a tablet.

There's no cloud computing happening here. Everything is running on the tablet in real-time. The hardware is so powerful that it's comparable to some of Nvidia's best desktop graphics cards. Nvidia aims to completely merge the gap between desktop and mobile architecture, allowing you to develop the best looking product and expecting it to simply work on your tablet and computer with no downgrading.

I'm still really taken back by this announcement. I think this is one of the greatest game changers in computer technology. Not just because mobile computing has almost completely caught up to everything else but because individual machines can potentially have the power to take on super computers. I never thought I would see that gap bridged this soon.

Also did I mention this is just the 32-bit model? Nvidia is also coming out with a 64-bit model called Denver! Even more power?! I can't even!!! <FAINTS>


Hit the jump for to see the reveal as well as some UDK demos on a tablet using the Tegra K1!