Another Look at Tegra K1 Tablet and Jetson TK1 Board

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By Kevin Parrish
published

Nvidia had several gadgets to fondle during GTC 2014.

This week during GTC 2014, Nvidia showcased a number of new and upcoming products including the Jetson TK1 developer kit featuring the Tegra K1 SoC, and prototype tablets sporting the same zippy chip. Also on hand were slim laptops with GeForce GTX 800M series GPUs running Titanfall at an amazing frame rate, and a monster PC with four Titan Black cards rendering a racing game across three screens.

As shown in the images below, Trine 2 was running on one of the Tegra K1 prototype tablets. A rep said that the PC game was ported to the platform to show that (1) the game can run on ARM-based hardware and (2) the game was easily ported because the chip is based on the Kepler architecture. Using a MOGA controller, I saw no stutters in gameplay: it was astonishingly smooth and seemingly native to the Android platform.

The prototypes on hand are based on the previous Tegra Note reference design. Actual product isn't expected to ship from partner OEMs until this summer, possibly June. Presumably, the current generation of the Tegra Note tablets will see a price drop due to OEMs making room for the new tegra K1 crop.

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Kevin Parrish
4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • teh_chem
    Trine 2 is a 2-3 year old platform game. I don't really call it impressive to show that an ARM-based platform with a decent GPU can run it. Also, not seeing the actual gameplay of said port, we can't really begin to compare (i.e., even though gameplay showed no slowdowns, what's the visual quality like in comparison to the original?).
    Reply
  • de5_Roy
    from the photos, if tegra k1 needs that much active cooling and from the looks of the dc input power supply, there's no way that chip is viable for tablets let alone smartphones. as for the so called tegra k1 tablets - no mention of specs (even if it's a prototype), it's powered from wall socket. there's always chance of overclocking/underclocking.
    may be i'm being overly skeptical because it's nvidia.
    Reply
  • Murissokah
    ^^I suppose the actual product will not have the same thermal/power envelope as the Dev kit, which makes you wonder whether this showcase can represent the actual performance delivered by the finished product.
    Reply
  • beshonk
    The Kepler structure is scalable. You want your dev platform to be the same architecture, but scaled up to speed up development (Dev platforms are not for testing, you test on the actual devices). This would require more power and a higher thermal envelope, obviously. You think this is unique? It's the same way developers for ios apps develop on macbook pros, instead of on iphones.The demos, running here, are running on actual tegra k1 prototype tablets. To say that running Trine2 smoothly is not impressive...is strange. It IS impressive for a mobile device to have graphics capabilities at that level. Otherwise, what would be the point of showcasing such?
    Reply