NVIDIA rumored to be working on a Tegra X1-powered Shield Tablet

NVIDIA announced its powerhouse mobile SoC, Tegra X1, at CES 2015 last month, but now it looks like we might see a new Shield Tablet emerge powered by this new processor.

The new Shield Tablet would reportedly be powered by the Tegra X1 chip, and announced during GTC 2015 next month. The current Shield Tablet is powered by the Tegra K1 processor, released back in July 2014 at $299 and $399 (Wi-Fi only, and LTE, respectively). The new Tegra X1 processor should arrive on a 20nm process, arrive as an 8-core processor with some serious power behind it.

We should expect it to feature around 500 GFlops of performance for 32-bit workloads, and 1 TFlops of compute power in 16-bit workloads. 2MB of L2 cache is found, while one of the quad-core CPU stacks (the Cortex-A57) includes 48KB of L1 instruction cache, and 32KB of L1 data cache. The GPU side of things should also be incredibly fast, as we have a Maxwell GPU inside of the Tegra X1 processor. It'll arrive with 256 Maxwell cores, thanks to the 2 SMMs from the Maxwell architecture.

As for pricing, NVIDIA will most likely keep the same $299 price that the Shield Tablet launched with, but the display resolution is going to be the big question. It's being speculated that we'll see a 1080p display, which is the same resolution found on the current Shield Tablet. I'm hoping for at least 1440p, while being hopeful for NVIDIA to push boundaries and unveil a 4K tablet. We will be live at GTC 2015, so we'll be sure to keep our ears to the ground and report on the new Shield Tablet, or anything Tegra X1 related at GTC 2015.