The gap between mobile and PC gaming has just been made a little smaller thanks to an announcement from graphics company Nvidia at this year’s CES event in the states. The company took the wraps off of a new “192-core super chip” called the Tegra K1 which is aiming to throw Nvidia’s 192-core Kepler graphics processing unit at gamers on pretty much every platform that isn’t a standard PC.
The Tegra K1 boast the same Kepler architecture that runs the company’s “fastest GPU on the planet”, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, and is being aimed at everything from tablets and smartphones to smart TVs, cars and will see it going into competition with the new generation of game consoles.
That last bit is slightly important since Nvidia have made a pretty extraordinary claim for a mobile processor, saying that it will be “…the first mobile processor to deliver the same graphics features as the next generation of consoles (Xbox One, PlayStation 4) and faster performance than current generation consoles (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3)”. Imagine one of Microsoft’s Surface tablets able to run an Xbox One game and you’re most of the way towards seeing what these chips can do.
There are two versions of the Tegra K1 on the way. Due in the first half of 2014 is the 32-bit edition which uses a quad-core ARM Cortex 15 CPU along with that 192-core Kepler GPU while the second half of the year will see the 64-bit version released which will utilise Kepler technology along with a custom-designed dual Super Core CPU from Nvidia which is based on the ARMv8 architecture.