Nvidia confirmed the presence of Maxwell GPU tech in this future SoC and considering that the Maxwell core is heavily optimized for efficiency, this is something that could really benefit the new SoC. Nvidia designs its future chips to vertically move across all possible segments, so Erista can be expected to go after phones, tablets, developer kits and Shield-like devices as well as traditional home consoles. However, this makes us wonder what will happen to the Tegra 4i, i.e. whether we will see similar products in the future, based on different CPU cores than the "big" Tegra parts.
Basically Erista targets all the markets that previous Tegra products tried to crack. The Tegra 4 delay was a setback and it cost Nvidia some revenue and market share, but this should not happen in the future as the Tegra K1 is shipping in the Jetson development kit for $192 in a few weeks. Tablets and phones should happen over the next few months, although we still believe we will see more tablet design wins than phone design wins.
We could not get a straight answer if Erista will feature ARMv8 64-bit cores or a 64-bit Denver like core, or maybe both of them in different versions of the chip. Nvidia decided not to discuss this, but kept insisting Erista is a 2015 product.
We were told to expect more design wins moving forward but once again we did not hear anything specific and there were no official announcements. Nvidia will let us know when the time comes. For the time being, the focus is on K1 products, not Erista which is still a long way off.
