The World's First Mobile 'Superchip' Is Insanely Powerful And The Size Of A Thumbnail

Nvidia

Nvidia unveiled the world's first "superchip" Sunday night at a press conference for the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The superchip is called the Tegra X1, and it's twice as powerful as last year's Tegra K1 chip, and can even boast more power than world's fastest supercomputer of 15 years ago.

That super computer, the ASCI Red, was the first computer to reach one teraflop of processing power. It took up 1,600 square feet and required over 500,000 watts to accomplish the feat. The Tegra X1 is the size of a thumbnail and is capable of reaching one teraflop of processing power with less than 10 watts.

The tiny chip is built using the same technology found inside Nvidia's computer graphics cards, and it is capable of rendering 4K at 60HZ in addition to offering a big boost in graphics and lighting in video games.

The Tegra 1 will "begin appearing in the first half of the year," according to a press release, but Nvidia hasn't announced any smartphones that will feature the Tegra X1.

For now, the Tegra X1 will be used to power Nvidia's newly announced Nvidia Drive car computers, which will be capable of auto-parking and stitching together video feeds from 12 different cameras to create a 360-view of the car's surroundings.

You can read more about the Tegra X1 right here.