Nvidia To Detail New Tegra Mobile Chip At Hot Chips
The next-generation Nvidia Tegra chip is coming soon and Nvidia will provide some details about "Tegra-next" next month at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino. The chip, possibly code-named Parker, will power the yet-unreleased Nvidia Drive PX2 computer for vehicles.
The Drive PX 2 was introduced at CES in January, and Nvidia said it had a "next-generation Tegra" chip.
Tegra chips were once hot in smartphones, tablets and portable media players, but they soon lost ground to competition. Nvidia's recent Tegra chips have targeted self-driving cars. Nvidia's Tegra chips are powering Google's Pixel C tablet and Nvidia's Jetson developer boards, Shield tablets and TV set-top boxs.
The Drive PX 2 chip has two integrated computing modules with 12 CPU cores and two GPUs. Each module had four ARM-based Cortex-A57 and two Denver 64-bit cores and a Pascal GPU.
Some of the fastest computers in the world already have Nvidia GPUs for complex calculations, but are paired with Intel CPUs. The new Tegra CPU and Pascal GPU could give Nvidia a full package of chips for ARM-based supercomputers.
The chip in PX 2 also has some "deep-learning" instructions, which can process large data sets and build predictive models to spot and recognize trends.
The Drive PX 2 delivers about 8 teraflops of performance with the new chips, a significant improvement over the Drive PX 1, which had Tegra X1 and clocked in at 2.3 teraflops.