GM of Nvidia's Tegra business unit Deepu Talla told us that the general expectation is that Denver CPU performance will generally be better than what we can expect from a standard ARM Cortex A57 core. He said that when Nvidia builds an architecture, it usually doesn’t want to match the competition, it tries to make it faster than the reference.

Since A57 will be the highest performing ARM 64-bit core, the general idea is that Nvidia has to beat that to get some traction. Talla said that we can expect the Denver dual-core Tegra K1 64-bit part to end up faster than A57-based CPU.

This is a big deal and if works well for Nvidia might create quite a popularity for Nvidia’s first 64-bit SoC. It will be great for Nvidia if they can deliver on this promise. The shipping date for Denver based Tegra K1 is still the second half of 2014 and we don’t know how Nvidia plans to price or position its 32-bit and 64-bit Tegra K1, at least not yet.

We were told that we should expect Tegra K1 in phones, tablets, consoles, automotive, dev kits such as the Jetson board, and all other markets that Nvidia addressed with previous Tegra processors.