NVIDIA (NVDA -3.33%) introduced its powerful Tegra K1 chip at the 2014 International CES earlier this year. It's an important product for the company, and investors are hoping it helps add to the business (and stock price) momentum NVIDIA has seen over the past year.
The "Tegra Processor" unit is one of two reporting segments for NVIDIA. It comprises Tegra system-on-chip product lines for phones, tablets, PCs, automotive, and gaming devices. The unit pulled in $398 million last fiscal year, accounting for almost 10% of all NVIDIA revenue. However, that total is down some 48% from the prior year – so management and shareholders alike are hoping the K1 will help reverse that trend.
CES provided a great first look at the K1. Motley Fool analyst Rex Moore was in Las Vegas for the big show, and spoke with NVIDIA's Doug MacMillan about the new chip and what it will mean to consumers and developers.
In addition to its effect on mobile gaming, the K1 chip is a natural fit for the automotive industry's Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, offering photorealistic virtual instrument panels and processing 1.2 gigapixels of information coming in from camera streams. In this video segment, MacMillan explains explains more about the growth possibilities the K1 provides for NVIDIA.
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Transcript:
Rex Moore: What do you expect, growth wise, for the K1?
Doug MacMillan NVIDIA: I think this extends into some of the markets we're already in -- phones, tablets, etc. -- but I think it opens up a lot more opportunities. We play very heavily in automotive, but this opens up another generation of opportunities.
With all the visual computing that's available now and that's going into cars, like Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and things like that, this is a big deal for that because that 192 core GPU is able to process 1.2 gigapixels of information coming in from camera streams, so we can do lots of ADAS stuff, in addition to digital instrument clusters.
Imagine that your dashboard is just a big piece of glass, and all of the instruments that are in that dash will now look like they're full, real instruments, but they're just generated. They're rendered on the fly with photorealistic materials.
