Mobile gaming made a leap this week, as chip-maker Nvidia announced a new processor for mobile devices that it claims will offer better graphics than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
The Tegra K1 features 192 GPU (graphics processing unit) cores, based on the same Kepler technology used in the US firm’s high-end PC components.
The chip was showcased using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 at the Consumer Electronics Show Las Vegas event.
The advance is intended to help Nvidia compete against Qualcomm and Samsung for orders from manufacturers.
The company was beaten by rival AMD for the contract to make the graphics chips that power the recently released PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles.
Nvidia’s current generation Tegra 4 mobile chips – which feature 72 GPU cores – are used by Microsoft’s Surface 2 tablet, Asus’s Transformer Pad Infinity hybrid, the Toshiba Excite Pro tablet and Xiaomi’s Phone 3.
California-based Nvidia’s chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang described the Tegra K1 as offering next-generation graphics to mobile devices “for the first time” when he announced the news at the Consumer Electronics Show.
He noted that while the chip outperformed the last-generation consoles, it required just 5% of their power.
He added that it would be released in two variants: one with a quad-core Cortex A15 CPU (central processing unit) designed by the British firm ARM; the second with Nvidia’s forthcoming dual-core Denver CPU, which is a customised version of ARM’s more powerful 64-bit V8 architecture.
The 32-bit version of the Tegra K1 is intended to appear in devices before mid-2014, and the 64-bit version by the end of the year.
Watch this video explaining how the new graphics chip works below: