Nvidia promises cool graphics and controls for your car with its Tegra K1 chip

LAS VEGAS — Nvidia wants to make the inside of your car look like the heads-up display of a fighter pilot’s cockpit. And it will do so by getting auto makers to use its new Tegra K1 mobile chip as the heart of the car’s electronics system.

Nvidia made the announcement at a press event at the swanky Cosmopolitan Hotel ahead of the beginning of the 2014 International CES, the big tech tradeshow in Las Vegas this week.

Nvidia’s Tegra K1 is the hardware that goes with the company’s designs for dashboard user interfaces. The graphics on the Tegra K1 chip are so good that the company is working with auto makers to design cool new user interfaces that fit into a car’s dashboard.

Nvidia’s Tegra K1, a 192-core mobile processor announced tonight, will be like a supercomputer running graphics, user interfaces, and sensor processing in the car. It’s a programmable platform for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

Most such systems are controlled by fixed-function chips. But Nvidia’s Tegra K1 is programmable, so that it can download new algorithms and improve the performance of your car over time.

The Nvidia chip can detect whether you are driving out of your lane or if you are too close to another car. That takes a lot of machine-vision smarts and a lot of raw computing power.

“We are superexcited about this new capability,” Huang said. “Tegra K1 is the biggest project we have ever worked on.”