NVIDIA’s new SoC is here
NVIDIA is kicking off CES by announcing their new Tegra X1 “mobile super chip” which their CEO says is fast. Super fast. Just how fast? Well, the X1 is aparrently capable of exceeding 1 teraflop of computing power, which is equivalent to the world’s fastest supercomputer in 2000. While that doesn’t sound too impressive, the Tegra X1’s specs, at least on paper, looks rather beastly – eight-core 64-bit CPU and 256 GPU cores, and is on track to deliver twice the performance of the already impressive Tegra K1.
NVIDIA ran a video demo of Unreal 4’s Elemental running on the new Tegra X1 SoC, and while Engadget says that the demo had a few elements missing (less detail and particle effects compared to when it ran on a desktop) the mere fact that it was able to run it, and run it well spoke volumes of the X1’s power.
That’s thanks to the Maxwell GPU architecture, which NVIDIA has basically utilized for the Tegra X1. As far as power efficiency goes, you’re looking at around 10 watts of power for the Elemental demo – compared to other platforms like the Xbox One that needed around 100 watts to render the same scene.
