At a media event earlier today at CES, Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) announced its latest mobile SoC, the Tegra X1. Building on the direction the vendor took with the Tegra K1 last year, the X1 brings the Maxwell architecture to mobile, and offers an astounding teraflop of processing power, which is a first for mobile.
With the Tegra X1, Nvidia stuck with custom ARM cores, unlike the Denver CPU cores from last year. The X1 comes with four Cortex A57 cores and four Cortex A53 cores in a big.LITTLE arrangement that features cluster migration instead of global task scheduling and a custom interconnect. AS for custom cores, Nvidia has stated that the main reason for sticking with stock cores was so that it could get the SoC out in the market early. While there is no confirmation of the same, it is possible that we may see a Denver-variant of the X1 sometime later in the future.
Nvidia provided benchmarks of the Tegra X1 conducted on a reference design board with 4 GB RAM and a large heatsink. Here are the synthetic benchmark scores for the tablet:
| Nvidia X1 | HTC Nexus 9 | Nvidia Shield Tablet | iPad Air 2 | |
| AndEBench-Pro | 12,401 | 12,097 | 10,398 | N/A |
| 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited | 43,769 | 24,356 | 31,051 | 21,659 |
| GFXBench 3.0 Manhattan Offscreen (fps) | 65 | 32 | 33 | 32.4 |
| CF-Bench | N/A | 31,695 | 43,038 | N/A |
The vendor also showcased high-definition content playback, with the X1 handling 4K playback at 60fps without any issues whatsoever. Power efficiency was also touted by Nvidia, with the iPad Air 2 consuming 2.6 watts, versus 1.5 watts for the X1. It will be a while before we see retail tablets featuring the Tegra X1, but for now it looks like 2015 will be an exciting year for Nvidia in the mobile segment.
