14 DAY TRIAL // If you followed what happened at CES 2015, you probably know NVIDIA took the opportunity to unveil their latest 20nm Tegra X1 chip.
The new architecture arrives as a successor to the Tegra K1 SoC and should be implemented in upcoming high-performance mobile devices.
Since the Tegra K1 didn't really hit the spot with smartphone manufacturers and was mostly implemented in tablets (into the NVIDIA Shield, Xiaomi Mi Pad, Nexus 9 or Google Project Tango), the Tegra X1 will probably follow a similar trail in life.
Tegra X1-equipped tablets coming soon
Now a new report coming out of Fudzilla indicates that NVIDIA is planning to announce a new version of the Shield Tablet that will take advantage of a Tegra X1 chip at GTC 2015 (GPU Technology Conference) scheduled for March 17.
The Tegra X1 is an octa-core 64-bit ARM chip taking advantage of four Cotex-A57 2MB L2 cores and another four Cortex-A53 512KB L2 cores.
The same chip is also porting the Maxwell setup to mobile. The 20nm silicone supports 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 inside the Tegra K1, the Maxwell cores bring forth 40% better performance and 2 times the efficiency, so we can expect the next-gen Shield Tablet to be very speedy when it comes to gaming.
What do you hope to see in the next NVIDIA Shield tablet?
The NVIDIA Shield Tablet is quite an offering. It is one of the few slates to have actually received the Android 5.0 Lollipop update so far, hence NVIDIA is working with Google in close proximity.
The slate can be connected to work with the Shield gaming controller and NVIDIA is offering the Shield Hub app, which offers over 400 optimized games for the tablet.
The Shield slate has ShadowPlay gaming recording technology and NVIDIA has also added Twitch integration to allow users to record and broadcast gameplay to the streaming service.
For the time being, we don’t know anything about the specs of the Tegra X1-enhanced Shield Tablet, but chances are we’re going to see it arrive with a larger display and a more extended goodie pack than the original.
