When Nvidia announced the incredibly powerful Tegra K1, complete with Desktop-class ‘Kepler’ GPU, they said that two versions of the chip would be hitting devices throughout 2014. While we’ve already seen the Tegra K1 show up in some device benchmarks, and a test board is available for people to buy, the dual-core 64-bit version of the chip has yet to arrive. With a lot more cache, and using the 64-bit architecture, the ‘Denver’ SoC should be a little more powerful than the quad-core K1, despite having only half the amount of CPU cores. While Nvidia has been somewhat quiet on the launch of their “Dual Super Core”, it’s recently been spotted in Android source code, hinting that it’s not too far away from launching.
The industrious folks at Myce have once again been through Android’s source code commits and found references of a 64-bit SoC listed as the “Tegra132” which is comprised of 2 ARMv8 64-bit cores and uses the same GTK20A Kepler GPU as found in the quad-core version of the K1. As well as the SoC being found in the code, a number of board names have been uncovered, including Exuma, Loki, Laguna, Norrin, TN8 and Bowmore. One interesting piece of info is that Myce has noticed the name “Norrin” in Chromium discussions in the past, which could be a hint that a Chromebook running a Tegra K1 is on the horizon. All these boards support the “Tegra124” – the quad-core version of the Tegra K1 – which could mean the dual-core SoC uses the same pins and is a like-for-like replacement, much like the Snapdragon 800 and 801 are.
With nothing more than that to go on, it seems like Nvidia is getting ready to launch their Tegra K1 powered devices after having announced them a long time ago. We recently saw a 7.9-inch tablet with a K1 chip inside, which could be a sequel to the Tegra Note tablets that Nvidia used to get the Tegra 4 off the ground. Hopefully, the Tegra K1 will be launching soon, in either 64-bit or 32-bit versions as right now, there seems to be a lot of Snapdragon 801s roaming around.
