Early benchmarks suggest Nvidia's new Tegra K1 SoC is a winner

Shawn Knight

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Nvidia took the wraps off its new Tegra K1 SoC during last week’s Consumer Electronics Show but apparently at least one system builder already had a working prototype on the show floor. Tom’s Hardware stopped by Lenovo’s booth and was fortunate enough to run some benchmarks on their Thinkvision 28 set for launch later this year.

Although Lenovo didn’t come right out and say the Thinkvision 28 was equipped with a K1 chip, all of the winks and nods suggested that was the case. CPU Z wasn’t much help either but judging by the benchmarks below, there could be no other mobile chip capable of turning in these sort of numbers at present.

early nvidia tegra apple qualcomm benchmark tegra k1

In Futuremark’s 3DMark test, the Tegra K1 dominated the competition – nothing else really even came close. It’s a trend that carried over in GFXBench as well with the only victory (a narrow one at that) coming in AnTuTu where the Tegra 4 barely edged out the K1.

It’s also worth noting that the chip in the Thinkvision 28 was only clocked at 2GHz, not the 2.3GHz that Nvidia claims the K1 can operate at. As such, the GPU’s clock rate was probably lower than normal as well although polling its clock rate was inconclusive.

Other benchmarks out of China even suggest the K1 is capable of beating an Intel Haswell laptop with integrated graphics despite the fact that the notebook requires significantly more power. We have no way to validate these tests but at the very least, I’d say the results from Tom’s Hardware are legit.

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Man, that looks promising! I really thought the Tegra 4 would get more adoption than it has, maybe this K1 will be the SoC that ramps up the mobile computing/gaming race.

As for comparing to a Haswell system, I think that will be very hard to accomplish and have the numbers make sense. Different processors, different architectures, it's a bit of an apples & oranges comparison. Or maybe more like apples & pears (close but still different).
 
I wonder how the Snapdragon 805 (upgraded GPU) will fare vs the K1. It seems like Apple has some work to do on its CPU.
 
After the whole Samsung deal where they had special code in the S4 to do great on benchmarks I kinda take them all with a grain of salt. I think after that story there was even something about it being somewhat normal to program for benchmarks.

I hope this chip performs as well as it's advertised, but until a site like Anandtech gets their hand on a retail device it's all talk.
 
Not a fare comparison. Tegra K1 will be released around the same time when Apple's A8 goes into production, 'cos that's the product that Tegra K1 will have to compete with, and not A7.
 
What's the sense in getting excited about performance figures when their successors always seem to be better. Wait until you see the Tegra K2's performance figures (and you'll only have to wait for a maximum of a year to see them). :)
 
The K1 is out now 1Q2014 and has been benchmarked in the new Lenovo monitor (this article). Those saying it will be out in 2nd half of 2014 and will compete with A8 are not talking about this 32 bit chip.

The upgraded K1 which we don't have any benchmarks for yet will be 64 bit and use NVIDIAs new optimized Denver processors instead of the A15. It will set higher benchmarks than these that already double those of the A7.
 
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