NVIDIA Announces Super-Fast Tegra K1 ARM SoC

NVIDIA has kicked off CES week by announcing their latest Tegra ARM SoC, the Tegra K1. The NVIDIA Tegra K1 is a killer SoC with custom 64-bit design and a Kepler-derived graphics processor with 192 GPU cores.

The initial spin of the NVIDIA Tegra K1 SoC is using a 32-bit quad-core, 4-Plus-1 Cortex-A15 processor where as the second version is using a design custom to NVIDIA that incorporates a 64-bit dual Super Core CPU. This is what's been referred to as NVIDIA's "Project Denver" in the past.

The 32-bit K1 should be available in H1'2014 while the 64-bit ARM design will be out in H2'2014. This ARM SoC should be stunning with its OpenGL 4.4 capable hardware and should deliver graphics quality and performance like we've never seen before in the ARM world. NVIDIA was heavily promoting the K1 as being able to run Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4.

NVIDIA says that the graphics feature set will match the next-generation consoles while delivering faster performance than current-generation consoles like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The Tegra K1 also features NVIDIA CUDA support for GPGPU computing in the mobile space.

I can't wait to get my hands on the NVIDIA Tegra K1 for some extensive benchmarking. The performance should be great and give Intel/AMD a run for the money with performance-per-Watt. Fortunately, NVIDIA already did some porting of the Phoronix Test Suite to ARM 64-bit and is running it on their designs, so it's just a matter of time until we can easily run some benchmarks when receiving new hardware on our end.

Many more details on the just-announced NVIDIA Tegra K1 can be found from the NVIDIA.com press release. More K1 details and other CES news is coming shortly.