NVidia X1 Mobile Processor Delivers a Teraflop of Computing Power in your pocket

by Pete Daniel on 5 January 2015 · 2389 views

Back in 2000 ASCI Red was developed with offered the first teraflop in the supercomputer environment. Just 15 years later and NVidia are achieving the same computer feat in their mobile processor, the NVidia Tegra X1.

The Tegra X1 has a 64-bit CPU with eight cores and a GPU with 256 cores. Despite the awesome power of X1 processor it uses only 15 watts of power. By comparison, the ASCI Red supercomputer requires 1,600 square foot of available floor space and sucked down 500,000 watts. Progress indeed.

The Nvidia Tegra X1 processor is expected to double the processing power of the Tegra K1 chip which was only made available just a year ago. Processing power is moving twice as fast than predicted by Moore's Law now.

The ASCI Red was used by the US government to manage their nuclear protection program; the Tegra X1 will merely be a mobile processor to run your productivity and gaming apps, and play movies smoothly. More of a feel good factor there.

The new processor uses the Maxwell GPU architecture that featured in PCs last year and is now coming to mobile markets. Again, graphical performance is expected to roughly double what was achieved with the Tegra K1 chip in 2013.

Going Beyond Tablets and Smart Phones

Beyond tablets and smart phones, the Tegra X1 chip will be used in car-based information and entertainment centers.

Using the NVidia Drive Studio software, designers can create fully digital dashboard systems with navigation, information flow, and visual entertainment systems. Surround Vision which is able to display a 360 degree view of the vehicle in real time will also be useful.

With NVidia Drive PX an installation of dual Tegra X1 chips delivering 2.3 Teraflops of processing power which can handle 12 camera feeds simultaneously and process 1.3 gigapixels per second of images. Pattern-recognition is based around neural networks to create computer imagery for dashboard systems which can recognize 75 objects at the same time. Dashboard computers will benefit from this integration of computing power and visual intelligence using the enormous power of the Tegra X1 chips.