When Nvidia announced its next generation mobile SoC, the Tegra K1, it was the fastest and the most powerful chipset in the world. It was far more superior to its competitors, especially in the graphics department. Its 192-core GPU has its roots in the desktop class GPU architecture; Nvidia Kepler. It looked like no one could beat the Nvidia Tegra K1 in terms of performance, at least within a year of its release but, we were wrong! Looks like Apple just punched Nvidia in its face.
According to the benchmark scores, Apple's new A8X chipset, which is a glorified version of A8 SoC, is faster than the Nvidia Tegra K1, even in the graphical performance. The Apple A8X has a tri-core 64-bit CPU and a more powerful PowerVR GX6650 GPU. In GFXBench, Apple iPad Air 2 with A8X chipset churned out more frames than the Nexus 9 with a Tegra K1 chipset.
The HTC Nexus 9 uses a dual-core 64-bit Denver version of the Nvidia Tegra K1 as opposed to the quad-core 32-bit ARM Cortex A15 version. Even in the CPU department, the tri-core A8X is faster than the Nvidia Tegra K1, as per the multi-core GeekBench 3 benchmark app.
Also Read: Qualcomm Finally Announces 64-Bit Snapdragon 808 and Snapdragon 810 High-End Mobile Processors
Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 810 SoC which is their first high-end chipset to use 64-bit CPU cores but it hasn't been used in any device yet. Smartphones and tablets with Snapdragon 810 will only be available in the market in the first half of 2015. On the other hand, Intel's 64-bit quad-core chipset based SoCs are already available to smartphone and tablet vendors but it isn't popular. It is used in the Nexus Player and the MemoPad 7 from Asus as well as the Dell Venue 8.
It remains to be seen if the Nvidia Tegra K1 gets used in a smartphone as it is being touted as power-hungry but we are not sure about that.
