NVIDIA Tegra K1 Performance and Power Consumption Revealed – Xiaomi MiPad To Ship With 32-Bit and 64-Bit Denver Powered Chips

May 16, 2014

NVIDIA revealed their Tegra K1 SOC at CES 2014 which will feature the latest Kepler cores along with the 32-bit ARM and 64-bit Denver cores. Yesterday, Xiaomi unveiled their upcoming Xiaomi MiPad that is a 7.9" tablet and the first device to feature NVIDIA's Tegra K1 system on chip.

Xiaomi MiPad To Ship With 32-Bit and 64-Bit Denver Powered Chips

Before heading to the main news, I would like to talk about the Xiaomi MiPad which was introduced yesterday. The MiPad which is a 7.9" tablet features an IPS display bearing a resolution of 2048x1536 and surrounded by a asymmetrical bezel, plus being available in several different colors which are a nice touch to its design scheme. The design specifications include an 8MP main camera on the back followed by a 5MP camera on the front and the design is mostly simplistic.

On the technical side, the Xiaomi MiPad is the first tablet to feature NVIDIA's Tegra K1 SOC and would be sold in both 32-bit and 64-bit variants. The Tegra K1 SOC is built on a 28nm HPm process which holds true for the both variants. The dual core variant with Denver CPU and 7 Way superscalar compute will feature the 64-bit ARM v8 cores and 192 Kepler cores with clock frequency of 2.5 GHz while the 32-bit Quad core ARM variant will be clocked at 2.3 GHz. The 64-bit Denver model comes with 128KB + 64KB while the 32-bit variant comes with 128KB + 32KB L1 Cache. Both models will feature a 25.46 Whr (6700mAh) battery, 16 - 64 GB flash storage, Micro SD slots, 802.11 b/g/n wireless and Bluetooth 4.0. Both devices would feature support for Android 4.4 KitKat. Arriving in June 2014 (just around Computex), the price would be set around $240 for the 16 GB and $272 for the 64 GB variant.

NVIDIA Tegra K1 Specifications:

	NVIDIA Tegra K1 64-Bit	NVIDIA Tegra K1 32-Bit	NVIDIA Tegra 4	NVIDIA Tegra 3
Codename	Logan	Logan	Wayne	Kal-El
ARM Cores	2 Core (Multi-Thread)	4+1	4+1	4 Core
ARM Architecture	64-bit ARM v8 (Custom)	32-bit Cortex A15	32-bit Cortex A15	32-bit Cortex A9
GPU Architecture	Kepler	Kepler	GeForce GPU	GeForce GPU
GPU Cores	192 Core	192 Core	72 Core	12 Core
Process	28nm	28nm	28nm HPL	40nm LPG
Core Frequency	2.5 GHz	2.3 GHz	1.9 GHz	1.2 GHz
Memory Size	8 GB	8 GB	4 GB	2 GB
Memory Type	DDR3L / LPDDR3	DDR3L / LPDDR3	DDR3L / LPDDR3	DDR3 / LPDDR2
Cache	128 K + 128 K L1	32K + 32K L1	32K + 32K L1	-
Launch	2014	2014	2013	2012

NVIDIA Tegra K1 Performance and Power Consumption Revealed

With the devices out of the way, let's talk about the more technical bits such as performance and power numbers of the Tegra K1 devices. Power consumption results from Phoronix reveals some surprising numbers with a Jetson TK1 drawing less than 12W under any load while the SOC itself draws a power of just 6W which shows that Tegra K1 might just end up much better than previous Tegra chips. Some numbers are given below (Courtesy of Phoronix forums):

	Tesla K40 + CPU	Nvidia Tegra K1
Single Precision Peak	4.2 TeraFlops	326 GFlops
Single Precision SGEMM	3.8 TeraFlops	290 GFlops
Memory	12GB @ 288GB/s	2GB @ 14.9GB/s
Power (CPU + GPU)	~ 385Watt	<11Watts
Performance Per Watt	10SP GFlops Per Watt	26SP GFlops Per Watt

FULL SYSTEM JETSON TK1 DC POWER ANALYSIS
  Includes
    * Audio in/out Active
    * Gigabit Ethernet
    * USB 3 driving Keyboard, Mouse, Logitech C210 Webcam
    * HDMI out at 1920x1080
    * Cooling Fan (no heat sink)
    * Installed 64GB SD card

BASE MEASUREMENTS

Power-in Voltage : 12.15V

Amperage and wattage

Idle KDE Desktop : 0.22A ( 2.67W)
Fan Amp : 0.07A ( 0.85W)
System Amp* : 0.17A ( 2.06W) *NV measurement

Idle Less Fan : 0.15A ( 1.82W)
Idle Less System : 0.05A ( 0.61W)

TEST1 : glmark2 -s 1920x1080 --off-screen

Score : 282 (Intel Celeron J1900@2.9GHz = 151)
Power Measurements:
Base : 0.22A ( 2.67W)
Peak : 0.62A ( 7.53W)
Observed Avg. : 0.35A ( 4.25W)

Avg. Less Fan : 0.28A ( 3.40W)
Avg. Less Sys : 0.18A ( 2.19W)

TEST2 : CUDA Smoke particle demo

Power Measurements:
Base : 0.62A ( 7.53W)
Peak : 0.91A (11.06W)
Observed Avg. : 0.88A (10.69W)

Avg. Less Fan : 0.81A ( 9.85W)
Avg. Less Sys : 0.71A ( 8.26W)

TEST3 : VLC streaming 720p video from NAS GbE

Power Measurements:
Base : 0.29A ( 3.52W)
Peak : 0.41A ( 4.98W)
Observed Avg. : 0.34A ( 4.13W)

Avg. Less Fan : 0.27A ( 3.28W)
Avg. Less Sys : 0.17A ( 2.01W)

There are also some very interesting performance results of the Xiaomi MiPad which have been revealed on several benchmarking databases such as GeekBench, GFXBench and those displayed officially be Xaomi during the launch event. The results show good performance for a chip that's rated with a TDP of below 10W and with Kepler cores on board, we can finally be able to get some decent performance and gaming capabilities in next generation handheld and mobility devices.