Kicking off CES festivities in Las Vegas on Sunday, the company announces the next generation of its mobile chip. by Richard Nieva January 5, 2014 8:33 PM PST (Credit: Nvidia) LAS VEGAS -- Nvidia hopes its chips are so advanced you'll think extraterrestrial life was behind them. Nvidia on Sunday unveiled the latest in its line of "impossibly advanced" mobile chips, the Tegra K1. Earlier on Sunday, the chipmaker confirmed that it was behind a rather elaborate publicity stunt: a crop circle that appeared late in 2013 in a field in Chualar, Calif., about two hours south of the Bay Area. The image represented one of the company's mobile chips, and contained the numbers 1, 9, and 2 in braille, a reference to the number of cores in the newly announced chip. "It's almost inappropriate to call it Tegra 5, because it's simply not linear," said CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, at the Consumer Electronics Show here. The Tegra K1 incorporates Nvidia's Kepler GPU, which currently dominates the discrete graphics market. Related posts Nvidia at CES 2014: Join us at 8 p.m. PT Sunday (live blog) Nvidia Shield, Qualcomm Toq: Carrying a torch for consumers Nvidia CEO: We intend to keep investing in Shield As the market for personal computers continues to shrink, Nvidia has been making bigger bets on mobile chips in an attempt to makes its business less dependent on PCs. But the shift to mobile has been difficult for the bulk of companies that found their bearings on the desktop, and Nvidia is no exception. The company's chips power the Microsoft Surface and Google Nexus 7 tablets, but Nvidia has had more trouble finding a presence in smartphones. The Tegra 5 will be an important product for the chipmaker. Because of a lagging release schedule, the last version of the chip -- the Tegra 4 unveiled at last year's CES conference -- missed many design cycles and failed to gain traction with smartphone makers. Last March, Huang boasted at the company's GPU Technology developers conference that the strength of the chips in Nvidia's Tegra line would increase 100-fold by the line's fifth year. The next iteration of the chip, likely to be announced next year and code-named Parker, would presumably be the manifestation of Huang's claim. A chart detailing Tegra's projected chip strength from Nvidia's GPU conference last march. (Credit: Screenshot Shara Tibken/CNET) The company further discussed its future in gaming, calling its GeForce brand the core of its gaming strategy. Huang said it is now possible with GeForce to capture a user's game and share directly to the gamer video service Twitch without hurting his or her frame rate. He also mentions that about 40 million people a month watch games on Twitch. Developing. More to come...
Kicking off CES festivities in Las Vegas on Sunday, the company announces the next generation of its mobile chip.
LAS VEGAS -- Nvidia hopes its chips are so advanced you'll think extraterrestrial life was behind them.
Nvidia on Sunday unveiled the latest in its line of "impossibly advanced" mobile chips, the Tegra K1.
Earlier on Sunday, the chipmaker confirmed that it was behind a rather elaborate publicity stunt: a crop circle that appeared late in 2013 in a field in Chualar, Calif., about two hours south of the Bay Area. The image represented one of the company's mobile chips, and contained the numbers 1, 9, and 2 in braille, a reference to the number of cores in the newly announced chip.
"It's almost inappropriate to call it Tegra 5, because it's simply not linear," said CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, at the Consumer Electronics Show here.
The Tegra K1 incorporates Nvidia's Kepler GPU, which currently dominates the discrete graphics market.
Related posts
- Nvidia at CES 2014: Join us at 8 p.m. PT Sunday (live blog)
- Nvidia Shield, Qualcomm Toq: Carrying a torch for consumers
- Nvidia CEO: We intend to keep investing in Shield
As the market for personal computers continues to shrink, Nvidia has been making bigger bets on mobile chips in an attempt to makes its business less dependent on PCs. But the shift to mobile has been difficult for the bulk of companies that found their bearings on the desktop, and Nvidia is no exception.
The company's chips power the Microsoft Surface and Google Nexus 7 tablets, but Nvidia has had more trouble finding a presence in smartphones. The Tegra 5 will be an important product for the chipmaker. Because of a lagging release schedule, the last version of the chip -- the Tegra 4 unveiled at last year's CES conference -- missed many design cycles and failed to gain traction with smartphone makers.
Last March, Huang boasted at the company's GPU Technology developers conference that the strength of the chips in Nvidia's Tegra line would increase 100-fold by the line's fifth year. The next iteration of the chip, likely to be announced next year and code-named Parker, would presumably be the manifestation of Huang's claim.
A chart detailing Tegra's projected chip strength from Nvidia's GPU conference last march.
(Credit: Screenshot Shara Tibken/CNET)
The company further discussed its future in gaming, calling its GeForce brand the core of its gaming strategy. Huang said it is now possible with GeForce to capture a user's game and share directly to the gamer video service Twitch without hurting his or her frame rate. He also mentions that about 40 million people a month watch games on Twitch.
Developing. More to come...
