NVIDIA’s new Tegra X1 chip looks insanely impressive

NVIDIA announced its Tegra X1 processor at CES today, and dear God is it impressive. The company intends for this new chip to power everything from tablets and high end smartphones to various connected devices. What NVIDIA is focusing most heavily on, however, is cars. The Tegra X1 will be powering some of the most advanced in-car entertainment and driver assistance systems that we’ll see in the months to come. 

Nvidia today announced the Tegra X1, a new processor for cars, tablets, and connected devices with the most powerful GPU we’ve seen in a mobile chip yet. The X1’s graphics processor is so speedy that it provides 1.7 times the performance of Apple’s A8x chip, found in the iPad Air 2. Until now, the A8x had the best GPU of any current mobile chipset. On GFXBenchmark, our favorite graphics benchmark, the X1 scored 54.7fps on the Manhattan test and 65.8fps on the Manhattan Offscreen test. The Google Nexus 9, with Nvidia’s previous K1 chip, scored 22.6 and 31.7. The Apple iPhone 6, with the A8 processor, scored 30 and 17.7. (Pay more attention to that second number, as it isn’t affected by screen resolution.) The key is Maxwell, Nvidia’s new 256­core graphics processor design. Maxwell came out for desktop PCs late last year. The X1 brings it to mobile devices in part by shrinking it to 20nm from the 28nm process we saw in the desktop graphics cards.