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Nvidia Announces 192-Core Tegra K1 Chips, Bets On Android

Posted by samzenpus on from the get-it-while-it's-hot dept.

sfcrazy writes "Nvidia just announced Tegra K1, its first 192-core processor. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made the announcement at CES 2014. He also said that Android will be the most important platform for gaming consoles. 'Why wouldn't you want to be open, connected to your TV and have access to your photos, music, gaming. It's just a matter of time before Android disrupts game consoles,' said Huang." Nvidia's marketing department created a crop circle to promote the chip after CEO Jen Hsun Huang declared that it was so advanced that "it's practically built by aliens."

16 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. "Android most important platform for gaming" by mrchaotica · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nvidia's just saying that because they lost the bid for all the consoles.

    (It doesn't mean it's not true, though.)

    --

    "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    1. Re:"Android most important platform for gaming" by UnknowingFool · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well maybe, but also there is the trend that most people are playing games on smart phones and not consoles. For everyone that bought a new game for PS4 or Xbox One, there are probably 10x as many consumers who bought Candy Crush Saga. Not everyone wants to spend hours in front of TV or monitor playing games. Some people just want a bit of downtime between doing other things.

      --
      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
    2. Re:"Android most important platform for gaming" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Nobody wants to spend $300 dollars on a console that ties up your $500 TV while your using it and buy a few $60 games on top of it, when you can just download a game on your phone that you already have and spend $4 on it.

      Both of those things give entirely different experiences. There will be plenty of people who prefer casual games on a phone screen, there will be plenty who prefer high-resolution fancy graphics displayed on their big TV with a control system more flexible than a touch screen, and there will be many who enjoy both depending on what they're in the mood for.

      It's like arguing that nobody in their right mind would buy a $400 PC with a $150 monitor and $60 software packages on top of that when you can download an office app that lets you do spreadsheets and other office work on that phone you already have. People now have the option of using a phone when they want to which wasn't an option in the past, so of course some people will make that jump when it suits them, but it doesn't mean that console/PC systems are obsolete and have nothing to offer anymore.

    3. Re:"Android most important platform for gaming" by mangu · · Score: 2

      There will be plenty of people who prefer casual games on a phone screen, there will be plenty who prefer high-resolution fancy graphics displayed on their big TV with a control system more flexible than a touch screen

      The problem with consoles right now is that any argument you can make for consoles vs. tablets you can also make for PC gaming vs. consoles, and any argument you can make for consoles vs. PCs you can also make for tablets vs. consoles.

      Consoles are in an ever shrinking gap between tablets and PCs, I don't think their market has very much space to grow.

    4. Re:"Android most important platform for gaming" by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

      Nobody wants to spend $300 dollars on a console that ties up your $500 TV while your using it and buy a few $60 games on top of it, when you can just download a game on your phone that you already have and spend $4 on it.

      Both of those things give entirely different experiences. There will be plenty of people who prefer casual games on a phone screen, there will be plenty who prefer high-resolution fancy graphics displayed on their big TV with a control system more flexible than a touch screen...

      You're talking about the hard core basement couch potato gamer demographic, now busy raising kids and growing a fine crop of gray hair while being steadily replaced by the ADHD social gaming generation on phones and tablets. The trend is fairly clear.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    5. Re:"Android most important platform for gaming" by maccodemonkey · · Score: 2

      Well maybe, but also there is the trend that most people are playing games on smart phones and not consoles. For everyone that bought a new game for PS4 or Xbox One, there are probably 10x as many consumers who bought Candy Crush Saga. Not everyone wants to spend hours in front of TV or monitor playing games. Some people just want a bit of downtime between doing other things.

      Ehhhh. That's not the reason behind this.

      You're right, mobile gaming is huge. But Candy Crush Saga doesn't require a Kepler GPU. There aren't many popular mobile games, tablet or otherwise, crying out for more horsepower at this point.

      NVidia has a more basic problem. As the grandparent post noted, their customers are drying up. The industry has pretty much agreed the IGP is the future. IGP delivers extremely fast compute performance and lower power usage. Both the Xbox One and PS4 use a single chip for graphics and GPU. So if you look at the landscape:
      - Intel has the Core processor and the Iris Pro IGP.
      - AMD has their processors and the Radeon IGP.
      - NVidia has ??? and GeForce.

      Cue an Nvidia scramble. In order to compete against all in one chips, they need a processor architecture. Intel's x86 processors would be a great candidate, but Intel has pretty much decided on going their own for integrated graphics. Nvidia implementing their own x86 silicon against two established competitors would also be an uphill climb, if they could even get a license.

      But Nvidia does have the option of ARM open to them. They can (and they did) build an Nvidia GPU coupled with an ARM CPU. Problem solved! Except ARM hasn't caught on yet with PCs. So they now need a market for their ARM chips until PCs warm up to ARM. So Nvidia begins making Tegra for tablets and phones.

      This is why Nvidia is pitching silicon for a use case that doesn't exist. If they don't come up with a single chip solution, they'll be run out of business. They're using the tablet and phone market to keep themselves floating until they can launch Tegra on PC and consoles. Both may never happen, but if Nvidia wants to stay alive, that's really the safest bet to make.

      I'm not sure OP was going for an explanation this deep, but he wasn't THAT far off in calling this a response to being drummed out of consoles.

  2. Re:Global Warming is a fucking JOKE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Completely off-topic and feeding the troll so I'm AC'ing but here in Trondheim, Norway our Christmas Eve was the warmest on record ever. Ever see those nice pressure spirals on TV? Where air flows down on the left-hand side (assuming northern hemisphere) it gets fucking cold, where air flows up on the right-hand side it gets fucking hot. It pretty much evens out for the planet.

  3. Re:"...powered by the 192-core NVIDIA Kepler GPU.. by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 4, Informative

    The CPU in this has four 32-bit 2.3GHz Cortex A15 cores. A model will come out later with two 64-bit 2.5GHz "Denver" cores -- a CPU of NVidia's own making which they haven't released many details about but their benchmarks show as significantly faster.

    When I saw them marketing it as 192 cores I let out a sigh... because these kind of dumb tactics are so expected now.

  4. Practically built by Aliens? by Anarchduke · · Score: 4, Funny

    Why didn't they give this the code name Roswell?

    --
    who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
  5. Re:"...powered by the 192-core NVIDIA Kepler GPU.. by Z00L00K · · Score: 2

    It would have been a lot more interesting if it actually was 192 CPU cores in it. Of course it would be a bit of a challenge to code for it - and to get an efficient OS build for it. But on the other hand it's probably the way that we need to go in order to get more performance in the future.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  6. Practically built by aliens by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Better be careful with statements like "Practically built by aliens". Nvidia might be getting a visit from immigration control to make sure their aliens are not illegal.

  7. Re:"Practically built by aliens", huh ? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I suppose that adds a cool, hip, sci-fi spin to the fact that we farmed out development to an outsourcing shop somewhere in ethniclashistan to save money...

  8. Re:Crop circle by Threni · · Score: 2

    "I definitely thought the crop circle was manmade, given...." ...that they all are?

  9. First? by gman003 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    To begin with, the summary and headline are being misleading - that's 192 GPU "cores" (really ALUs - there's only one scheduler on this entire GPU), so it's already inaccurate. But it's also hardly the first Nvidia chip with 192 "cores".

    First Tegra with a 192-core GPU, but it's not their first 192-core GPU. Their first was the GeForce 260, followed by the GeForce GTS 450, GTX550 Ti, GT630, and GT635.

    In fact, this is basically a GT630 with a smaller memory interface (64-bit LPDDR3 instead of 128-bit DDR3) and a few power optimizations.

    The sad thing is, they don't have to make up bullshit for marketing - they're bringing a full-fledged, full-featured GPU to mobile products, with all the modern features that entails. And even with just one SMX at low clocks, that's still a lot of horsepower - I run Crysis at 1080p on high with just two SMX units (660M). Putting that amount of power into a tablet would be impressive on its own, no lying about "cores" necessary.

    1. Re:First? by Nemyst · · Score: 3, Informative

      The problem is, you needed an entire paragraph to get your point across (and that's assuming people know what Crysis is, which is fine on PC but not so much on mobile). They need to make it sound impressive in five words or less, otherwise the fickle market has already turned their collective head elsewhere.

  10. Does anyone believe it? by edxwelch · · Score: 2

    A 5W chip producing 360 gflops. To put that into persective a GeForce 730M, which has the same architecture, but twice as many cores and rated at 556.8 GFLOPS, is a 33W part.
    So basically, Nvidia have made Kepler 4 times more efficient with no architecture changes. What magic did they use?