Google Taps NVIDIA Tegra K1 For Android TV And Project Tango at IO

Google's ongoing I/O conference has so far been bursting at the seams with interesting announcements. In fact, there's been so many announcements that it's been a little hard to keep up. One of the more interesting ones surprisingly doesn't come from Google, though. Rather, it comes from NVIDIA, and it's a development that bodes well for its Tegra SoC.

NVIDIA says that its Tegra K1 has "led the charge" at I/O with Android-based products on the way that are targeted at gaming, TV, automotive, and robotics markets. K1, for example, is the first processor to support Google's upcoming Android L release. Making this even more important is the fact that Google will have a 64-bit version of L, which not so surprisingly will suit NVIDIA's upcoming 64-bit Tegra K1 variant just fine. That same K1 variant will be the backing CPU in Android's Project Tango devkit, and it's also been rumored that it will power the second-generation NVIDIA SHIELD.

As if that wasn't enough of a win, K1 is also the first processor to support the new Android TV development platform. NVIDIA has a reference platform already available for this, which set-top box and TV OEMs can use. For app and game developers, NVIDIA will soon offer a Tegra Android TV dev platform to you as well.

Further, NVIDIA says that its Tegra K1 can deliver the best experiences created by Google's also-new dev platform Android Auto. It's not hard to see why NVIDIA would want to tout itself here, as it's been taking the automotive market seriously for quite a number of years, with things really ramping-up over the last couple of Tegra releases.

In conjunction with all of these announcements, NVIDIA showed us once again what the Tegra K1 can muster from a gaming standpoint. Fortunately for you, NVIDIA was kind enough to upload a video to show you rather than just tell you:

I'm still in relative awe that we're seeing effects like tessellation, image-based lighting, HDR tone-mapping, and so forth on a mobile platform. The demo simply looks awesome.

While NVIDIA's Tegra SoC can be easily found in a number of mobile devices, there are still many who haven't owned a device backed by one. With all of these announcements and forthcoming products, it looks like that will soon change.