NVIDIA has been the first few pebbles of the landslide that is CES for the last few years, and 2015 is no different. To kick off the world's biggest consumer tech show, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang started with mobile. The company announced its successor to the Tegra K1 mobile processor, the Tegra X1. This chip includes an octa-core 64-bit CPU married to a 256-core GPU. And that second chip is the killer: it's based on the same architecture as the latest full-sized NVIDIA desktop graphics cards, Maxwell.

While Huang was quick to point out the chip's fantastic graphical capabilities (without going into extreme detail), he also wanted to show off its video rendering prowess. The Tegra X1 is rated to handle 4K video at 60 hertz, using both the H.265 and VP9 standards. He also wanted to highlight the chip's efficiency, showing a slide that says the X1 uses about 40% less power than the Tegra K1 (which powers the company's current flagship SHIELD tablet) under the same load. The single tech demo for the mobile Tegra X1 was "Elemental" from Epic. To be perfectly honest, it wasn't all that impressive - while the crumbling temple and fire demon were complex, the live rendered demo showed some clear choppiness and loss of frames.

NVIDIA showed performance increases of roughly 40-100% over the K1, and considerable improvements over Apple's proprietary A8x architecture as well. The company claims that the Tegra X1 is the world's first mobile processor to reach teraflop performance, at a tiny fraction of the power required to do so on an Intel Core i7 processor. Unfortunately, Huang went immediately to a demonstration of the X1 running a proprietary dashboard and infotainment system for a dummy car (though it was running Android Auto). While NVIDIA will certainly use the Tegra X1 in an upcoming Android device and license it for other electronics vendors, there's nothing to report on that front at this time.

Expect Tegra X1 hardware, including some SHIELD iteration, later this year. NVIDIA's previous two generations of chips have debuted in the summer in the northern hemisphere.

Update: Here's the video of NVIDIA's press conference. Skip to 6:40 to see the Unreal 4 tech demo.