NVIDIA's 2016 Tegra SoC Is Looking Even More Interesting

At NVIDIA's CES press conference last night they announced the DRIVE PX2 as a "in-car super-computer" that's "as powerful as 150 MacBook Pros", while this SC is powered by a yet-to-be-announced SoC.

The DRIVE PX2 is designed for self-driving cars and with having so much information to process, the SoC powering this has to be a beast. NVIDIA hasn't formally announced the SoC successor to the Tegra X1, but there's speculation that this System-on-a-Chip could be a refined version of the delayed "Parker" SoC.

About this new SoC, there is said to be 12 CPU cores, a Pascal GPU, 8 TeraFLOPS of compute power, and will be manufactured on a 16nm FinFET process. The CPU core configuration is particularly of interest with having four ARM Cortex A57 cores -- similar to the Tegra X1 -- but there will be two "Denver" CPUs. Denver, for those that don't recall, is NVIDIA's custom-designed core first introduced with the Tegra K1 but took a back-seat for the Tegra X1. It will be fascinating to see what the new Denver has in store.

Information beyond those immediate details aren't yet available nor is any launch date. But with having more CPU power than the already powerful Tegra X1, leaping already to the next-generation Pascal architecture, and moving to 16nm FinFET process should make NVIDIA's next-generation Tegra quite beautiful. Now to start praying that they'll release a Jetson development board in a timely manner once that SoC is launched compared to the slow turnaround time with the Jetson TX1.