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Comment by gcp | Hacker News Reader

Sure, they have their ARM core CPUs that have proven to be decent, but I don't see them blowing anyone out of the water with them

What? Their first iterations were somewhat meh (Tegra K1 with Denver 1 in the Nexus 9), but the latter iterations and reoriented focus (Jetson K1, K1 with A15s, Denver2) having been scoring some excellent design wins.

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NVIDIA had about 5 different generations of Tegra before the K1 [1]. The A15-based K1 (T124) came before the Denver-based K1 (T132) AFAIK. Both are very nice and a clear improvement over the previous generations. Denver is a bit inconsistent in its performance, but on average it dominates A15s and A57s. Nexus 9, however, has very poor thermal design and can only dissipate a small fraction of the heat output of the T132.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegra

More to the point, those previous 5 generations were generally disappoting. Slow chips with decent but not mindblowing graphics, and extremely short support windows that left early adopters flapping in the breeze. Nvidia had quite a bit of ground to make up, but from what I've seen of their latest chips they made it. I think they're the fastest mobile chips you can buy this side of Apple's monsters.

Tegra2 was notoriously one of the few ARMv7 chips without NEON.

I actually agree that Denver 1 in the K1 is really fast, but it's not scored many designs wins, perhaps exactly because of the thermal restraints. The A15 based design seems to have less of that problem.

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