Nvidia says Tegra Erista mobile chip coming in 2015

Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang announced that its next-generation Tegra mobile processor, Erista, will hit the market in 2015.

The chip is a follow-on to the 192-core Tegra K1, which Nvidia unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Erista will have better performance than the Tegra K1, but Huang didn’t say how much better. Still, the fact that the company plans to deliver that chip shows that it is sticking to its regular cadence of introducing new mobile processors, which are beginning to push the high end of computing.

Erista is named after a comic superhero who is the son of Wolverine in the Marvel Universe.

“Erista is going to continue a long tradition of superheroes,” Huang said. “I can’t wait to see Erista.”

Nvidia didn’t show any specific Erista demos, but you can bet that Erista will be able to handle physics demos like the one below.

Nvidia is shipping its Tegra K1 in the second half of the year.

Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at research firm Insight 64, said he is glad that Nvidia showed a roadmap for the Tegra family, but he would be happier if the chip company landed a major customer for Tegra. That’s hard to do because Apple and Samsung make a lot of their own mobile chips, and Samsung buys what it doesn’t make itself from Qualcomm.

“It’s hard to see where the high-volume opportunity will be for Nvidia,” Brookwood said.