NVIDIA’s 192-Core Tegra K1 Processor Is 3 Times Faster Than Apple’s A7 [CES 2014]

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CoA-CES-2014-bugYour smartphone and tablet will soon offer noticeably better performance than a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, thanks to NVIDIA’s new Tegra K1 processor, the successor to last year’s Tegra 4. The 192-core “Super Chip” will come in two versions, one of which is built upon a next-generation 64-bit Denver architecture and boasts clock speeds up to 2.5GHz.

“We believe the Android operating system will be the most important console operating system in the future,” said NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang during the company’s CES press conference in Las Vegas. But to compete with traditional video game consoles, Android needs the right hardware, and the Tegra K1 is a step in the right direction.

Quad-core processors are the standard for high-end mobile devices these days, but there are some companies — like Samsung — that are now pushing 8-core CPUs. But rather than compete with those, NVIDIA chose to develop a 192-core CPU with Denver architecture that blows them all out of the water.

According to NVIDIA, the Tegra K1 offers three times the performance of Apple’s 64-bit A7 chip, which has been getting heaps of praise from users, developers, and reviewers since it made its debut inside the iPhone 5s last September. Like the A7, one version of the Tegra K1 will boast custom 64-bit architecture with Direct X 11.1 support.

The other version will have a quad-core Cortex-A15 CPU based on 32-bit Kepler architecture, with clock speeds up to 2.3GHz. Both chips will — quite incredibly — be more power efficient than last year’s Tegra 4 processor.

It’s unclear at this point which devices will carry these processors first, but NVIDIA says the quad-core A15 Tegra K1 will be available during the first half of 2014, while the 64-bit Denver version will be available during the second half of the year.

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