NVIDIA nTeresting Newsletter – 20 January 2014 – CES Edition

In This Issue:

CES 2014 Special Edition

· NVIDIA kicks off CES 2014 with a tech-fueled keynote featuring chips, cars and gaming.
· A crop circle stirs up speculation for the out of this world specs of Tegra K1.
· Tegra K1 brings desktop graphics to mobile devices.
· Epic is bringing Unreal Engine 4 to Tegra K1.
· Tegra K1 Visual Computing Module will lead to self-driving cars.
· New G-Sync monitors show next-gen gaming goodness.
· GeForce GPUs dominate the new Steam Machines taking 11 out of 13 announced machines.
· Tegra K1 wins a dozen or so ‘Best of CES Awards’.

CES 2014 Edition

Every new year at NVIDIA gets rung in by two milestones: a CES tradeshow and the outbreak of flu and colds that follow. This year’s CES was highlighted by chips, cars and gaming, as outlined by the keynote that it kicked it off.

“NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled a powerful mobile graphics chip that aims to transform the look and feel of video games and to power photorealistic digital dashboards and to promote self-driving cars in the not so distant future.”

The Crop Circle Incident

This was an announcement that started well before CES, when a mysterious crop circle appeared south of NVIDIA HQ.

“Turns out, it wasn’t an alien creation.

We now know the source of the mysterious crop circle that turned up in the small town of Chualar, about two hours south of San Francisco. And it turns out a lot of the speculation about what the viral photo might be was correct.

NBC Bay Area was originally tipped off by an anonymous source, who said Silicon Valley chipmaker NVIDIA was behind the crop circle that was first spotted toward the end of 2013 by a photographer named Julie Belanger. We now have confirmation from the inside. The company plowed through the farm to (eventually) get publicity for their new mobile chip. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang detailed how the company came to create the circle that got so much attention press conference Sunday night at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, saying he had told his marketing department to find a way to generate buzz about the chip on a shoe-string budget.”

Introducing Tegra K1

The star of the show was the NVIDIA Tegra K1 mobile processor, which brings the DNA of GeForce GTX 780 to a mobile platform, enabling true next-gen gaming experiences. Tegra K1 is offered in two versions, with a 32-bit CPU and a 64-bit CPU.

“It’s things like Tegra K1 that really make covering the mobile space exciting.”

“(Tegra K1) will be a whole new door opened in the mobile computing universe.”

“In videogames, anything smartphones can do PCs can do much better. NVIDIA on Sunday night said it is changing that rule of thumb.”

“Does NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 Stand For ‘Kick Ass’?”

“NVIDIA just went from playing with mobile to dead serious in a heartbeat.”

“Holy Crap, NVIDIA’s New Tegra K1 Has 192 Cores?!”

Unreal Engine 4, On A Phone

Game developers are excited about Tegra K1 because it makes it possible, for the first time, to run the same amazing game content on PCs, consoles, and mobile devices.

“But NVIDIA has also announced that Epic Games is bringing Unreal Engine 4, one of the biggest next-gen gaming engines out there, to the K1. That’s big. And it means that the people who build games—beautiful, great games—are getting behind the K1 in a big way.”

Your Car, Your Computer

NVIDIA also introduced the Tegra K1 Visual Computing Module, our auto-grade processor that brings supercomputing tech into your car, and will bring self-driven cars to the mass market.

“The next generation of [Tegra] will perform at 384 GFLOPS … With four processors per car, a two-car garage would have as much computing power as the $120 million Blue Mountain supercomputer installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1998.”

We also demoed the world’s first photorealistic rendering for customized digitals cockpits for cars.

“At CES, NVIDIA unveiled that they are teaming up with Audi to develop a virtual cockpit, which will make its first appearance in the 2015 Audi TT sports coupe.

According to NVIDIA, the digital cluster will be powered by Tegra 3 and will give drivers plenty of information on the 12.3-inch HD display.

The virtual cockpit will give drivers detailed digital gauges, 3D maps and the ability to customize the controls on the dashboard.”

Since we formed our auto BU in 2004, NVIDIA has shipped 4.5M on units in 22+ car brands, including: Aston Martin, Audi, BMW, Fiat, Lamborghini, Maserati, MINI, Peugeot, Porsche, Rolls Royce, SEAT, SKODA, Tesla Motors and VW. Tegra drives the nav and infotainment systems in the newest Audi vehicles and other Volkswagen brands, including VW, Bentley, Lamorghini, SEAT and SKODA. We also power the infotainment, nav and instrument-cluster systems in Tesla Motors Model S, and BMW’s newest infotainment and nav systems.

Next-Gen Gaming is Here

With V-SYNC, the GPU and display are synch’ed to the vertical blanking interval where the GPU sends rendered frames to the display on a fixed cadence (60 times a second at 60Hz). V-SYNC has two issues: stuttering and tearing. G-SYNC synchronizes the monitor’s refresh to the GPU’s render rate, so images display the moment they’re rendered. Scenes appear instantly, objects are sharper, gameplay is smoother.

“NVIDIA also custom modded an ASUS PQ321Q 4K Monitor with NVIDIA G-Sync to show off how they can make Ultra HD Gaming (3840×2160) look incredible! We’ve seen plenty of demos with NVIDIA G-Sync running on the ASUS VG248QE at 1080P, but this really takes it to the next level!”

Acer, AOC, Asus, BenQ, Philips, and Viewsonic, had new monitors with G-SYNC at CES.

Steam Machines Are GeForce Heavy

A Steam Machine is an open platform, living room PC intuitive from Valve that runs the SteamOS. They were out in full force at CES, with our OEM partner’s showing off their NVIDIA-powered Steam Machines.

Alienware and CyberPowerPC showed Steam Machines in the NVIDIA booth. Alternate, Digital Storm, Falcon NorthWest, Gigabyte, Materiel.net, Next Spa, OriginPC, Scan, Webhallen and Zotac had GeForce-based Steam Machines in Valve’s booth.

Tegra K1 Takes Numerous CES 2014 Awards for Mobile Innovations

No tradeshow is complete without the “Best of” awards. After ripping the lid off our new 192-core mobile super chip at CES 2014, show awards began piling up from publications across the spectrum for the Tegra K1. Just a few of the outstanding awards we received:

Mashable named Tegra K1 one of the best technologies at the show, commenting that “everyone expected NVIDIA to unveil the Tegra 5. Instead the company surprised with the K1 — an incredibly powerful mobile processor with 192 cores that leverages NVIDIA’s experience with supercomputing.”

LAPTOP awarded Tegra K1 its Best of Show honor, writing that “the Tegra K1 could usher in a new era of Android gaming, where the leading publishers release their AAA titles to Google’s open source OS at the same time as Windows and Xbox — and ahead of iOS.”

Popular Mechanics similarly heralded the Tegra K1 for its ability to “imbue smartphones with gaming console powers,” and VentureBeat said that “This kind of technological advance lays the foundation for developers to create a whole collection of exciting new games.”

The Next Web called Tegra K1 “an incredible breakthrough for mobile devices. This is true desktop-class computing with mobile efficiency,” while TechHive named it Best Gaming Product.