NVIDIA starts sending out invites for a San Francisco event

Feb 11, 2015 07:28 GMT  ·  By

Last week it was revealed that NVIDIA might be prepping a successor for its popular gaming slob, the NVIDIA Shield Tablet.

The device shipped out with a Tegra K1 SoC on the inside, but since NVIDIA just announced the 20nm Tegra X1 chip, it’s no wonder the company is looking to introduce a product bundling this architecture.

A few days ago we told you that the next-gen Shield Tablet might be put on display for the world to see at GTC 2015 (GPU Technology Conference) scheduled for March 17.

Well, now it appears this won’t be the case and we’re going to meet the new slate sooner than expected.

NVIDIA teases a "game-changing" product

As reported by the Android Police, NIVIDA has started sending out invites to a press event scheduled on March 3 in San Francisco. Coincidentally, the event will take place just a few days before MWC 2015 opens its doors in Barcelona.

Anyway, NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will be looking to demonstrate something “5 years in the making.” The product is also said to be capable of “redefining the future of gaming.”

The invite teases a part of a device, and as far as we can see, it’s definitely a tablet. During the CES 2015 announcement of the Tegra X1, the company didn't reveal any consumer-grade products bundling the platform, but hopefully in a few weeks we’re going to see the first (maybe before other manufacturers have the chance to introduce their own at MWC 2015)

The internals of the Tegra X1 revealed

The Tegra X1 is an octa-core 64-bit ARM chip taking advantage of four Cortex-A57 2MB L2 cores and four Cortex-A53 512 L2 cores.

The chip is porting the Maxwell setup to the mobile environment. The 20nm silicone piece comes with support for Maxwell 256-core GPU, DX-12, OpenGL 4.5, NVIDIA CUDA, OpenGL ES 3.1 and AEP support.

Compared to the 192 CUDA cores on Kepler making up the Tegra K1, the Maxwell setup up offers improved performance with 40% and 2 times the efficiency

So the next-gen NVIDIA Shield Tablet is shaping out to be quite a monumental device. After all, a few days ago EA’s CFO Blake Jorgensen was heard implying that tablets would soon become more powerful than consoles in 3 to 4 years.

Could the next-gen Shield Tablet be the dawn of this transition?

NVIDIA has something to announce on March 3 (4 Images)

NVIDIA invite for March 3 event
Current NVIDIA Shield TabletNVIDIA Shield Tablet taken apart
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