Nvidia presents mobile chip with eight cores and Maxwell GPU

Chip company Nvidia has announced a new mobile chip called Tegra X1 on the eve of CES. The soc consists of eight 64-bit processor cores and a GPU that is based on the Maxwell architecture. Nvidia sees the car industry as an important market for the Tegra X1.

In the announcement, Nvidia mainly emphasized the GPU of the Tegra X1, which is based on the same Maxwell design as Nvidia’s recent video cards for desktops and laptops. According to the chip designer, it is the first mobile GPU that has more than 1 teraflops of computing power when processing 16-bit floating point numbers. That is considerably more than the 365 gigaflops of the Tegra K1 and according to Nvidia the GPU is also many times faster than the GPU in a fast desktop CPU from Intel, such as the 4790K.

In addition to the Maxwell GPU, the Tegra X1 contains eight 64-bit processor cores, presumably based on Nvidia’s own Denver design that was introduced with the Tegra K1. These eight cores are arranged in a 4+4 arrangement, according to Nvidia, which likely means that four cores are clocked lower and are only used at lower processor loads, which is similar to ARM’s big.Little layout.

Nvidia also revealed few details about the Tegra X1. For example, it is not yet clear at which clock speed the eight computing cores are ticking. Also, nothing is known about the clock speed of the GPU, the design of the memory controller or the production process used. Nvidia did announce that the GPU has 256 Cuda cores and has hardware support for the h.265 and vp9 codecs at a 4k resolution at 60fps and a 10-bit color depth. During the demonstration of a graphics demo based on Unreal Engine 4, it was reported that the chip consumes a maximum of 10W.

This makes the X1 not intended for use in phones or tablets. Nvidia did not mention those product groups, but emphasized the car industry. The company has even developed a small computer system for car manufacturers based on the Tegra X1, called Drive CX. Car manufacturers can use this hardware to control all the computer systems in their cars. Nvidia also provides a runtime, called ‘Drive Studio’, which should facilitate development for the platform.