Nvidia held a pre-CES 2014 press conference in which it unveiled a literally "game changer" in the form of the Tegra K1 mobile chip with a massive 192-cores, effectively changing the world of next-generation gaming consoles forever.
"We believe the Android operating system will be the most important console operating system in the future," said Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang. Prior to the announcement, Jen-Hsun got the audience caught up on the company's past Tegra milestones such as the Tegra 3 being the first mobole quad-core processor, according to Forbes.
"So what can we do next? We could do 8 cores, but that seems a little pedestrian," he joked before unveiling the 192-core Tegra K1 rooted in Kepler architecture.
According to Nvidia, Tegra K1 offers 3 times the processing performance as Apple's A7 processor chip. "We've brought mobile computing to the same level as desktop computing and super computing," Jen-Hsun said.
During the brief reveal, the company demonstrated its new Digital Ira human face simulation, a simulation that originally debuted with the $1,000 GTX Titan, according to reports from Forbes.
Nvidia seems to be putting a lot of its eggs in the Android operating system's basket. Fortunately, they're doing so with the backing of one of the industry's leading graphics engine creators, Epic Games. Epic took the opportunity at the press conference to show off its new Unreal Engine 4 on Tegra K1, the video of which can be seen below.
We can take absolutely anything that runs on PC or high end console and run it on Tegra...I didn't think that we'd be at this level on mobile for another 3 to 4 years." Epic Games' Tim Sweeney said. While this seems like the typical bold statement one might expect from such an event, the performance backed it up. The Tegra K1 seems to be the technological innovation that will bridge the gap between console-level gaming and mobile gaming. What that means for the average consumer remains to be seen, but it's likely that the game of gaming will be changing for the better in the very near future.
Tegra K1 will be offered in two pin-to-pin compatible versions: a 32-bit quad-core (4-Plus-1 ARM Cortex-A15 CPU) and a custom, Nvidia-designed 64-bit dual "Super Core" Denver CPU. You can find a full rundown of the chips specifics HERE.
