Not too long ago I questioned why we hadn't seen Nvidia's Tegra 4 processor show up in many mobile devices this past year considering the previous iteration powered the majority of Android devices on the market at the time. Perhaps the company's new 192-core Tegra K1 mobile chips are to blame.
Nvidia recently unveiled the "impossibly advanced" chip during its CES press conference in Las Vegas. And no, that isn't an error - 192 CUDA cores based on the Kepler GPU architecture, the same one used in discrete desktop graphics cards. This level of graphics power is roughly the same as a low-end GeForce GT 630 or 635 desktop cards from last year but in a mobile package.
The Tegra K1 will ultimately be offered in two varieties: a 32-bit quad-core model and a 64-bit version that will use Nvidia's dual-core Denver CPU clocked at up to 2.5GHz. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang compared the K1's performance to the Xbox 360 and PS3 in one slide, showing how it handily beats both in terms of GPU and CPU horsepower as well as power consumption - just 5 watts (under ideal circumstances, one would assume).
Raw power aside, Nvidia touted the benefits of using the same GPU architecture for desktop and now mobile components. As you might have already guessed, this will make it much easier for developers to bring their engines to mobile. One such example is Epic Games who is bringing their Unreal Engine 4 to Tegra K1.
We're hearing that the quad-core Tegra K1 will be available in the first half of 2014 while the 64-bit Denver SoC won't make an appearance until the second half of the year.