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nVidia Shield Tablet Review

http://www.anandtech.com/print/8296/the-nvidia-shield-tablet-review

Tegra K1 is a graphics performance monster!

But it does dissipate more power while doing so. 2.25 hours of battery life while running GFXBench 3.0 Manhattan (with 19.75WHr battery) implies about 8.8W of system power dissipation. That's incredibly high for an 8" tablet (though Apple's iPad 9.7" can peak a bit higher than that, it doesn't sustain power during a benchmark nearly that high).

The 1200p display will likely dissipate 2W of power, but the majority would be dissipated by the SOC - about 5-6W. Still, rather high for an 8" tablet, especially in a sustained benchmark. The chassis includes a magnesium thermal shield that spans the entire footprint of the tablet, which explains why the chassis doesn't get uncomfortably hot at this power level. Though it would be interesting to measure the heat coming off the chassis during gameplay.

In terms of architecture, the review states that the GPU can run up to 852MHz, which is fairly impressive, considering it's an entire SMX unit (192-shader count, yielding 327 GFLOPs of compute). It would offer better performance than a 720M mobile discrete entry card on PC games - though about half the performance of a 735M. Considering that it comes within 35% of the performance of Surface Pro 3 - it's really nipping at the heels of Intel's 15W processor line. Certainly with better performance per watt, currently. Haswell's 15W runs with 20EU and up to 1.1GHz turbo, yielding 352 GFLOPs - so you can argue that nVidia's performance per GFLOP is a bit less efficient than Intel's.

We've stated before that Intel needs to up their game in graphics architecture - though we have yet to see Broadwell performance, given the new Gen8 graphics architecture. I'm interested in seeing the performance at 4.5W TDP for Core M products. True, they'll have a new process generation helping them, but I would expect to get a cooler SOC than Tegra K1, capable of offering even better performance. I'd love to see what tablet vendors do with it.

Cherry Trail is yet another interesting design, though sadly, it seems to have slipped to 2015. With 16EU expected, it should have marginally better performance than Tegra K1, and likely dramatically lower power (2-3W, rather than 5-6W). I would have liked to have seen it sooner, given I expect to see 20nm SOCs ramp in 2015.