Nvidia Tegra X1
This from a press conference today. Does anyone know how accurate these claims are? Too early to know? Posted on http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/04/nvidia-announced-tegra-x1-with-maxwell-gpu/
This from a press conference today. Does anyone know how accurate these claims are? Too early to know? Posted on http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/04/nvidia-announced-tegra-x1-with-maxwell-gpu/
Comments
I imagine it won’t live up to its claims, just like the one before it.
At least it supports h.265. That can’t come fast enough.
I'd say it's more a matter of timing. They did this last year comparing the K1 against the 5S:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/174592-tegra-k1-benchmarks-show-better-cpu-and-gpu-performance-than-snapdragon-800-and-apple-a7
"At 1080p Tegra K1 nearly doubles the frame rate of the iPhone 5S and Nexus 5."
but the 5S was the previous model. They announced it in January and then shipped in June 2014:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8022/xiaomi-announces-the-mipad-the-first-tegra-k1-device
Then the iOS products came a few months later and if you check gfxbench 3 by unchecking the desktop OS versions on the right, you can see the iPad Air 2 is highest with the k1 below it:
http://gfxbench.com/result.jsp
The same thing should happen this year where NVidia announces the X1 in January, device manufacturers will order the parts and ship devices a few months later and then Apple will jump to PowerVR7 at their usual iOS device refresh:
http://www.imgtec.com/news/detail.asp?ID=933
It lists similar performance improvements to the X1. Apple also had the advantage of offering Metal to get the best performance out of the GPUs. NVidia probably has APIs to do the same but they don't hit a large enough userbase for it to be worthwhile for a lot of developers to use. Apple ships over 250m iOS devices every year with most having the new hardware.
Apple isn't a n00b, they've been at this a long time and if they saw better hardware components that made sense to use they'd use them. They also have to weigh up battery life with the performance but they manage to come out high in both metrics every year.
I'd say it's more a matter of timing. They did this last year comparing the K1 against the 5S:
...
Apple isn't a n00b, they've been at this a long time and if they saw better hardware components that made sense to use they'd use them. They also have to weigh up battery life with the performance but they manage to come out high in both metrics every year.
Thanks for an informative reply.
Kremlinology here. Nvidia's messaging for the Tegra X1 makes it sound like they are designing the SoC for embedded and automotive applications. This is where the Tegra line has had its primary success, so Nvidia is following where the money is coming from. The issue is that embedded applications and handheld applications don't have to overlap.
This X1 SoC looks to be more inappropriate for handhelds than the K1 was, and it looks to be encroaching on not being all that appropriate for tablet applications. You can use a fan to call the chip in embedded applications or a Chromebook, so pressure to keep TDP down to handheld levels won't be all that great for Nvidia. It's an easy decision to leave the handheld market once the money from it dries up and it'll give their R&D, engineering, an easier time to design the next device.