NVIDIA Tegra K1 Preview & Architecture Analysis
by Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi on January 6, 2014 6:31 AM ESTFinal Words
NVIDIA’s challenge with Tegra has always been getting design wins. In the past NVIDIA offered quirky alternatives to Qualcomm, most of the time at a more attractive price point. With Tegra K1, NVIDIA offers a substantial feature and performance advantage thanks to its mobile Kepler GPU. I still don’t anticipate broad adoption in the phone space. If NVIDIA sees even some traction among Android tablets that’s enough to get to the next phase, which is trying to get some previous generation console titles ported over to the platform.
NVIDIA finally has the hardware necessary to give me what I’ve wanted ever since SoC vendors first started focusing on improving GPU performance: the ability to run Xbox 360 class titles in mobile. With Tegra K1 the problem goes from being a user interface, hardware and business problem to mostly a business problem. Android support for game controllers is reasonable enough, and K1 more or less fixes the hardware limitations, leaving only the question of how do game developers make enough money to justify the effort of porting. I suspect if we’re talking about moving over a library of existing titles that have already been substantially monetized, there doesn’t need to be all that much convincing. NVIDIA claims it’s already engaged with many game developers on this front, but I do believe it’ll still be an uphill battle.
If I were in Microsoft’s shoes, I’d view Tegra K1 as an opportunity to revolutionize my mobile strategy. Give users the ability to run games like Grand Theft Auto V on a mobile device in the not too distant future and you’ve now made your devices more interesting to a large group of users. I don’t anticipate many wanting to struggle to play console games on a 5-inch touchscreen, but with a good controller dock (or tablet with a kickstand + wireless controller) the interface problem goes away.
For the first time I’m really excited about an NVIDIA SoC. It took the company five generations to get here, but we finally have an example of NVIDIA doing what it’s really good at (making high performance GPUs) in mobile. NVIDIA will surely update its Tegra Note 7 to a Tegra K1 version (most of its demos were run in a Tegra Note 7 chassis), but even if that and Shield are the best we get the impact on the rest of the market will be huge. With Tegra K1, NVIDIA really raised the bar on the GPU performance.
The CPU side, at least for the Cortex A15 version is less interesting to me. ARM’s Cortex A15, particularly at high clocks, has proven to be a decent fit for tablets. I am curious to see how the Denver version of Tegra K1 turns out. If the rumors are true, Denver could very well be one of the biggest risks we’ve seen taken in pursuit of building a low power mobile CPU. I am eager to see how this one plays out.
Finally: two big cores instead of a silly number of tiny cores
NVIDIA hasn’t had the best track record of meeting shipping goals on previous Tegra designs. I really hope we see Tegra K1, particularly the Denver version, ship on time (although I'm highly doubtful this will happen - new custom CPU core, GPU and process all at the same time?). I’m very eager not only for an install base of mobile devices with console-class GPUs to start building, but also to see what Denver can do. I suspect we’ll find out more at GTC about the latter. It’s things like Tegra K1 that really make covering the mobile space exciting.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
88 Comments
View All Comments
da_asmodai - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
This articles says first, first, first for Kepler core in mobile but it's not out yet and I believe everything that's claimed as a first in this article is also supported by the Adreno 420 in the already announced Snapdragon 805. I'd like to see a side by side spec comparison of Kepler, Adreno 420, and PowerVR Series 6XT.dwforbes - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
"FP64 support is also present, at 1/24 the FP32 rate"Should this 1/2 the FP32 rate, or is it really so crippled?
Ryan Smith - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
No, 1/24 is correct. It's so that you have native FP64 when you need it, but you aren't wasting die space on precision you aren't going to use.ddriver - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
nvidia being cheap once again, deliberately ruining compute performance like they did with desktop GPUs for years. And let me guess, no openCL support either? Thanks but no thanks, gonna stick to qualcomm and samsung mobile platforms and amd/radeon on the desktop. And for what? To push their ridiculously and shamelessly overpriced "professional" products?GTX 780 DP @ 1/24 SP
R9 290 DP @ 1/8 SP
R9 280 DP @ 1/4 SP
Loki726 - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
Adding big double precision units has real area and power costs (you typically can't rail gate off individual functional units). If you put full-rate double precision units in a mobile SoC it would just sit there draining your battery life.ddriver - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
Unfortunately, power efficiency is just the excuse to deliberately cripple compute performance of consumer products. As you see, AMD has no problem providing DP support with lower penalty, which is the reason my compute farm runs radeons exclusively, because the performance per $ ratio completely destroys prosumer products. I do realize I am a very specific and narrow case, since I couldn't care less about gaming and graphics performance, since I use it only to rasterize the compute output, but still... why not go for a more performing design, considering it is not that much about efficiency but the greed for the fat profit margins of teslas and quadros that motivates nvidia to cripple DP performance to such a horrendous extent.Loki726 - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
AMD doesn't release a mobile GPU part, and the Qualcomm parts which are based off of the old AMD VLIW5 design that they bought from AMD don't include double precision. Every little bit of power matters in mobile.ddriver - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
The 1/24 DP performance does not come as a mobile-dedicated design, even the GTX 780 is crippled this way, even though it is an enthusiast part, where power efficiency is the least concern.Loki726 - Monday, January 6, 2014 - link
They are different strategies. Neither one is ideal for everyone.Putting double precision hardware into consumer parts is effectively asking
gamers to pay for extra area and power. I do agree that this is less of an
issue in desktop parts compared to mobile, but it is still an issue and GPUs
have enough ALUs in them that you would notice it if every one of them got 10%
less efficient in benchmarks.
AMD builds one chip and sells it into both compute and graphics markets. In
order to make it appealing for compute applications they add double precision.
They make gamers pay for this even though they never use it, but they don't have
to pay the design costs of building multiple chips. NVIDIA builds two
different designs. One chip for compute and another one for graphics (although
this round they also sold the compute chip into the graphics market - Titan).
Presumably they do this because they think that they can recoup the extra cost
of building a different chip that only compute users buy, and by doing so
they don't make gamers pay extra for double precision.
The compute chip has extra features like more registers, ECC, more double
precision units, dynamic parallelism, etc. Chip design is expensive. Think
hundreds of millions of dollars for a new design. If there were just as many
users of compute GPUs as there are gamers who buy graphics cards, the prices
would probably come down a lot.
I'm with you that I would like to have cheaper compute parts with full double
precision support, but I think the only real way to drive down chip prices is to
make them a commodity. It won't happen until there is a killer compute app
that makes every desktop owner want to go out and buy a compute GPU.
ddriver - Tuesday, January 7, 2014 - link
And how do consumers exactly "pay extra" for the better DP performance when AMD GPUs are overall much better value than nvidia gpus? It seems to me that if the extra cost is as high as you believe it is (which it really isn't) then it is AMD that pays it with its profit margins.