Nvidia has reportedly kicked off an initiative with open source devs to support its upcoming K1 chip.
According to Liliputing, an Nvidia dev has already contributed some initial support for the chip to the Nouveau open source graphics driver project.
According to Liliputing’s Brad Linder, the Nouveau project has thus far been an initiative to reverse-engineer Nvidia’s proprietary graphics drivers for Linux so that developers could have free and open source software to modify and improve.
”While the new contributions to the project from Nvidia aren’t enough to ensure full support for the K1 chip (or any other Nvidia processors), it’s the first time Nvidia has contributed directly to the open source Nouveau project,” Linder explained.
Nvidia’s Tegra K1 SoC – the company’s next-gen flagship SoC – is equipped with powerful graphics architecture. As Linder notes, the silicon offers the potential to be one of the most advanced ARM-based processors on the market because it will be leveraging technology only previously available for laptop and desktop computers.
Nvidia is expected two deploy primary categories of K1 chips: a quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 32-bit CPU with 192 graphics cores and a dual-core 64-bit CPU equipped with similar graphics technology. K1 chips will undoubtedly find their way into a number of devices in the near future, including tablets and even desktop systems running Ubuntu and Fedora.
