The Consumer Electronics Show technically starts tomorrow (really, the shenanigans begin today), but that hasn’t stopped news from leaking out. The biggest report, so far, is NVidia’s demonstration of the Tegra K1, a chip that’s best described as the mobile CPU version of Ludicrous Speed from Spaceballs.
Essentially, the K1 is overkill. How much overkill? Try 192 cores of overkill. That’s not the same as the cores in a CPU, it’s worth noting, but it’s still almost triple the cores in the current Tegra 4, according to the Verge:
The 192 cores in the Kepler Mobile GPU is a small chunk of power taken from a laptop- or desktop-class computer, but outstrips the 72 cores of the Tegra 4. The company demonstrated as much at SIGGRAPH last year, boasting that Kepler Mobile had more raw computing power than the PlayStation 3.
To give you an idea of how absurdly powerful the Tegra K1 is, NVidia was using PC games playable on tablets to show off how effective it was. The demos were, by all accounts, imperfect, but keep in mind that this time last year, running a recent big-budget PC game on a tablet was essentially science fiction.
Interestingly, NVidia also claims that its GPU is more powerful than the PS3 or the Xbox 360, and it has the numbers to back that up. That’s a lot of oomph to stuff in a tablet or a little phone. Or, for that matter, the upcoming reiteration of the NVidia Shield. It also raises the question of where Project Denver, NVidia’s bid to be a CPU maker and not just a GPU manufacturer, fits in.
There’s no word on how much this processor will cost; even the demonstrations today were little more than prototypes stuffed into tablets. But essentially, sooner rather than later, you’re going to have a supercomputer in your pants.