Link: Nvidia unveils its scarily powerful Tegra K1 mobile chip

I was lucky enough to attend Nvidia’s lavish press launch for Tegra 4 this time last year at Palms Casino, Las Vegas.

Unfortunately, despite being blown away by the potential of Tegra 4 (and the then named Project Shield), the industry didn’t seem to be quite so interested and Nvidia failed to get its flagship SoC on any of the ‘big’ product releases of the year. Not even the 2013 Nexus 7, the successor to the original tab with Tegra 3.

I’m not convinced there’s a big enough market for a device that people will buy solely for the chipset, so if Nvidia wants to have any success before Qualcomm comes along with something new, it better act fast.

But well done to Nvidia for generating interest in advance, via a mysterious crop circle that appeared in a field somewhere in California’s Salinas Valley. It attracted quite a bit of attention and sparked various discussions about its origin.

Better yet, as this video shows, Nvidia had added some strong clues of its new chip in the symbol. But will this publicity stunt be enough?

Nvidia now needs to concentrate on getting Tegra K1 inside the products that people will be buying. That won’t mean impressing the consumer, but the manufacturers already working on devices for the second half of 2014 and beyond.

How they did it

NVIDIA Tegra K1 Demo: Unreal Engine 4