64-bit has been a buzzword in the mobile industry ever since the iPhone 5S was announced, and with its Tegra K1 mobile processor, Nvidia has entered the elite league now. This chip features a whopping 192 graphics cores, and kicks in the same Kepler architecture which is present on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti GPU. It can be noted that Epic Games’ upcoming Unreal Engine 4 will be supported by the new chip, giving you a fair idea of its capabilities.
Boasting of delivering the same graphics features as the Xbox One and the PS4, the Nvidia Tegra K1 chip will be offered to companies in two pin-to-pin compatible versions. While the first one is a 32-bit quad-core processor incorporating a 4-plus-1 ARM Cortex A15 CPU, the second version kicks in a custom 64-bit dual super core CPU. Codenamed ‘Denver,’ this CPU is based on the ARMv8 architecture which is claimed to deliver high single-thread and multi-thread performance.
Nvidia Tegra K1 provides support for gaming technologies like DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.4 and tessellation as well. It moreover grabs the distinction of being the first mobile processor to support the Nvidia Cuda platform. This new processor was unveiled by Nvidia at the ongoing CES 2014 event at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, US. And while all its features have been showcased, it still isn’t clear which device it will be making its debut with, let alone the other products it will be seen in.
Nvidia has however mentioned that the 32-bit Tegra K1 processor will be seen in devices coming out within the first half of 2014, whereas the 64-bit edition will be spotted in the second half of the year.