Tegra K1 Lands in Acer’s Newest Chromebook

Today Acer announced four new models of a new 13.3″ Chromebook design featuring Tegra K1. This is a significant launch for NVIDIA, proving there’s industry interest in Tegra K1 after the disappointing interest in Tegra 4 and notching NVIDIA their first Chromebook design win.

NVIDIA has two versions of the Tegra K1, one implementing a 4+1 configuration of ARM Cortex A15s, and another implementing two custom designed NVIDIA Denver CPUs. Acer’s new Chomebooks feature the former, so we have yet to see Denver CPUs in the wild. Samsung previously shipped a Chromebook featuring Cortex A15s via its Exynos processor and HP used the same SoC in their Chromebook 11. Samsung has since refreshed their ARM Chromebooks a few times, with new models using the “Chromebook 2” branding.

The most significant portion of the Tegra K1 SoC is its 192 CUDA cores. Chromebook relies heavily on web based applications, but with the rise of WebGL there have been some experiments with browser based 3D games. There haven’t been any AAA title WebGL games yet, but when they arrive, this Chromebook should be well equipped to handle them; NVIDIA specifically mentions the upcoming Miss Take and Oort Online, as well as WebGL ports of Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 5.

NVIDIA claims up to 3X the WebGL performance of competing Chromebooks, with processor performance superior to the Exynos 5800 and Bay Trail Celeron N2830. Unfortunately, no performance comparisons between K1 and the Haswell Celeron 2955U were provided. Since both Haswell and Tegra K1 are available for the Chromebook platform, we’ll also have the opportunity to perform CPU and GPU benchmarking to directly compare the processors. We have requested a review sample when Acer makes them available.

Beyond the marquee feature of the Tegra K1 processor, the Acer Chromebook also includes 2×2 MIMO wireless AC, an anti-glare coating, and two models feature a 1080p display. Specifications provided by Acer are listed below; Acer provided the model numbers for the three available for presale, and there is a fourth configuration available through resellers where we do not yet have the model number. Acer states they will begin shipping the first week of September.

Source: Acer

The higher resolution displays drop battery life a couple hours, which isn’t too surprising, but overall battery life of 11-13 hours is still great for a Chromebook. The industrial design of the new Acer Chromebooks is also much better than on the previous models, with clean lines and a white body. The Acer Chromebook is also fanless, thanks to reduced power requirements for NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 SoC.

Overall pricing looks good, with the base model matching the price of HP’s current Chromebook 11 and the 1080p upgrade taking on the HP Chromebook 14. But the real competition is still going to be with Acer’s existing Chromebook C720, which can be found with 32GB storage and 2GB RAM and a Celeron 2955U for just $229. There’s also the question of size; the C720 was an 11.6″ Chromebook, and while some might prefer a smaller device the 13.3″ will likely be preferred by others. Samsung’s Chromebook 2 13.3, which has a 1080p display and 16GB of storage and 4GB of ram, likely needs a price drop to compete as it is listed for $399. Either way, with ChromeOS continuing to improve over time, Windows laptops continue to face increasing competition from alternative laptops.

Gallery: Acer Chromebook 13

NVIDIA FY 2015 Q2 Financial Results

On Thursday August 7^th, NVIDIA released their results for the second quarter of their fiscal year 2015. Year-over-year, they had an excellent quarter based on strong growth in the PC GPU market, Datacenter and Cloud (GRID), and mobile with the Tegra line.

GAAP Revenue for the quarter came in at $1.103 billion which is flat from Q1 2015, but up 13% from $977 million at the same time last year. Gross margin for Q2 was up both sequentially and year-over-year at 56.1%. Net income for the quarter came in at $128 million, down 6% from Q1 and up 33% from Q2 2014. These numbers resulted in diluted earnings per share of $0.22, down 8% from Q1 and up 38% from Q2 last year but beating analysts expectations.

The GPU business is the primary source of revenue for NVIDIA, and includes GeForce for desktops and notebook PCs, Quadro for workstations, Tesla for high performance computing, and GRID for cloud-enabled graphic solutions. This quarter, the GPU revenue rose 2% over Q2 2014 with $878 million in revenue. This is down 2% from the previous quarter due to the seasonal decline of consumer PCs. Revenue from the PC GPU line rose 10% over last year and was helped by the introduction of the GeForce GTX 750 and 750 Ti Maxwell based boards. They are also seeing growth in the Tesla datacenter business. Quadro revenue also increased, citing strong growth in mobile workstations.

The mobile side of NVIDIA hasn’t seen as many product wins compared to Qualcomm, but the Tegra business is still growing strongly for NVIDIA. Tegra revenue was up 14% from Q1 2015, and 200% from Q2 2014 with a total revenue of $159 million for the quarter. Tegra continues to have strong demand in the automotive infotainment sector, with a 74% growth in that market year-over-year. This could be a lucrative market, with automotive systems generally locking in for at least several years compared to the mobile sector which might see a product replaced in less than a single year. The Tegra K1 has just come to market though, and it has shown itself to be a capable performer and may win some more designs soon.

The last avenue of income for NVIDIA is $66 million per quarter in a licensing deal with Intel.

The company projected this quarter to be flat on revenue as compared to Q1, and they were exactly right. Projections for Q3 2015 are for revenue of $1.2 billion plus or minus 2%.

During the quarter, $47 million was paid in dividends and NVIDIA purchased 6.8 million shares back from investors. This brings them to $594 million of the $1 billion promised to shareholders for FY 2015. The next dividend of $0.085 per share will be paid on September 12^th to all stockholders of record as of August 21^st.

It was an excellent quarter for NVIDIA, and their stock prices jumped after the numbers were released. All segments of the company are growing at the moment, and with the recent release of the Tegra K1 they can only be hoping to have another strong quarter of mobile grown in Q3 after a great 200% jump in Tegra revenue since last year. The stronger than expected PC sales have helped their biggest business as well, with the GPU division up 2%. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has worked to bring the company a more diversified portfolio, and with the recent gains in mobile and datacenter computing, the company has certainly had some recent success.

Nvidia and Epic Games Showcase the Power of Tegra K1 With Unreal Engine 4 “Rivalry” Demo

For the past few years there have been claims that mobile graphics performance and capabilities are about to reach that of gaming consoles like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Obviously because this has been going on for a few years that point hasn’t quite been reached yet. But if a new tech demo from NVIDIA and Epic Games is any indication of where graphics performance is headed that goal of matching the previous generation of game consoles on a mobile device may not be far off. The below video was made in Unreal Engine 4 and rendered on NVIDIA’s Tegra K1.

This tech demo was played during the keynote at Google IO. To achieve some of the effects in the video the teams at Epic Games and NVIDIA used Google’s new Android Extension Pack and OpenGL ES 3.1 which are supported in the upcoming Android L release. The Android Extension Pack is a set of extensions to OpenGL ES which provides features like tessellation to improve the detail of geometry rendered onscreen, and geometry shaders which can also be used to add detail to what is rendered onscreen as well as to add shadows to a scene. The Android Extension Pack also includes support for compute shaders, and Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) which we’ve talked about in depth previously.

Of course software is just one half of the equation. The GPU in NVIDIA‘s Tegra K1 breaks free of the old GeForce ULP design and works with the same architecture as Nvidia’s desktop GPUs. Specifically, the GPU in Tegra K1 is a Kepler based GPU with 192 CUDA cores, 4 ROPs (render output units), and 8 texture units. The 64-bit version of NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 will also be one of the first chips to ship in a new wave of 64-bit Android L devices with Google having updated the OS and their ART runtime to support the ARMv8 instruction set. It will be exciting to see a new generation of games enabled by more powerful hardware like NVIDIA‘s Tegra K1

Source: Unreal Engine on Youtube