NVIDIA Tegra K1 To Bring Console Gaming To Mobile

It turns out that the 310-foot crop circle discovered last week in a California barley field was part of a guerilla marketing campaign by NVIDIA for its new Tegra K1 processor. The crop circle has since been mowed out, but NVIDIA on Monday announced its new chip at CES 2014. As reported by CBS, the circle included repeated references to the number “192,” which corresponds to the number of cores in the Tegra K1 chip.

The K1 is a pretty remarkable upgrade over its predecessor, the Tegra 4. It comes in 32-bit and 64-bit variations and NVIDIA says that its 192-core Kepler GPU will bring console-quality gaming to the mobile world.

"Over the past two decades, NVIDIA invented the GPU and has developed more graphics technologies than any other company," said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO, NVIDIA in a press statement. "With Tegra K1, we're bringing that heritage to mobile. It bridges the gap for developers, who can now build next-gen games and apps that will run on any device."

While NVIDIA is well known for its contributions both to PC and console gaming, recent years have seen the company losing share to Qualcomm in the mobile world. It’s unclear when the new chips might start making their way onto tablets and smartphones, but preliminary response from the gaming industry has been pretty positive so far.

"With the introduction of this revolutionary processor, we can take applications that run on PC or console and run it on Tegra," said Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games and developer of Unreal Engine. "From here onward, I think we're going to see the performance and feature gap between mobile and PC high-end gaming continue to narrow to the point where the difference between the platforms really blurs."

The NVIDIA Shield and similar products have arguably already brought console-quality gaming to mobile devices with limited success. With the new Tegra K1, it will be interesting to see whether mobile HD gaming catches on in a bigger way when a dedicated device isn’t required.