NVIDIA Tegra

NVIDIA Tegra
Information
Type	System on a chip
Creator	NVIDIA
Developer	NVIDIA
Operating System	Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Android, Linux (Linux for Tegra)
Devices	Nintendo Switch, Magic Leap One, Tango tablet development kit, NVIDIA Jetson TK1, TX1 and TX2 boards and modules
Release Date	June 2008

NVIDIA Tegra is a family of systems on a chip (SoCs) designed by NVIDIA that combine ARM-based CPU cores with an NVIDIA graphics processor and video, imaging and connectivity hardware on a single die. NVIDIA launched the Tegra brand at Computex in Taipei in June 2008, aiming the first chips at smartphones, mobile internet devices and small notebooks, and later generations moved the family toward gaming devices, embedded computers and cars. By 2015 NVIDIA described Tegra processors as "built for embedded products, mobile devices, autonomous machines and automotive applications."

Tegra's link to virtual reality and augmented reality comes through the devices built on it. A custom Tegra chip runs the Nintendo Switch, the console used by Nintendo's cardboard Labo VR Kit. The Tegra K1 powered Google's Tango tablet development kit for mobile 3D sensing, and the Tegra X2 "Parker" SoC is the processor in the Lightpack of the Magic Leap One mixed reality headset. Tegra chips and a Tegra-based Jetson module also ran prototype standalone VR headsets from GameFace Labs, and an NVIDIA Jetson board served as the embedded test platform of the ILLIXR XR research system.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Chip announcement dates, CPU/GPU specs and process nodes for APX 2500 through Parker, the Switch, Labo VR, Tango, Magic Leap One and GameFace Labs hardware details, Jetson TX2 specs, the ILLIXR paper and current Jetson Linux/JetPack releases, checked against the cited NVIDIA pages and press sources. About review dates.

History

First generation (2008)

NVIDIA introduced the APX 2500 applications processor at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on February 11, 2008, pitching it for 3D user interfaces and high-definition video on Windows Mobile phones and claiming 10 hours of 720p HD playback. The chip launched without a brand name. At Computex in June 2008 NVIDIA grouped it with two new chips, the Tegra 600 and Tegra 650, under the Tegra name. NVIDIA's launch FAQ called the Tegra 650 "the second product in the Tegra line, the first being the NVIDIA Tegra APX 2500 processor," and said the 600 and 650 were meant for mobile internet devices, netbooks and web tablets running Microsoft Windows CE. bit-tech reported that the first Tegra chips paired an ARM11 CPU core with a GeForce graphics core, an HD video processor and an image processor, and that NVIDIA was openly targeting Intel's Atom platform.

Tegra 2, Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 (2010-2013)

NVIDIA announced Tegra 2 at CES in January 2010. HEXUS reported that the chip, also called the Tegra 250, had a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor running at up to 1 GHz and a low-power NVIDIA GPU capable of full-HD playback, and that Audi had confirmed a Tegra processor for all of its 2012 vehicles. Engadget described it as a 40 nm chip aimed at tablets, with support for Windows CE, Windows Mobile and Android.

Tegra 3, developed under the codename "Project Kal-El," followed on November 8, 2011. NVIDIA presented it as a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor that would deliver "PC-class performance" for tablets and smartphones, and named the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime as the first tablet to use it. Alongside the four main CPU cores, Tegra 3 had a fifth low-power "companion" core that handled light tasks, a scheme NVIDIA called Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing (vSMP). Its 12-core GeForce GPU supported stereoscopic 3D output. NVIDIA claimed three times the graphics performance of Tegra 2 and up to 61 percent less power consumption.

Tegra 4 was unveiled at CES on January 6, 2013. It kept the "4-plus-1" core arrangement of its predecessor but moved to ARM Cortex-A15 CPU cores and a 72-core GeForce GPU on a 28 nm process. Engadget wrote that the GPU offered about six times the visual output of Tegra 3, and that LTE support came through an optional additional chip.

Tegra K1 and Tegra X1 (2014-2015)

With Tegra K1, unveiled at CES on January 5, 2014, NVIDIA brought its desktop GPU architecture to the family. The chip had a 192-core GPU based on Kepler, the architecture of the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, and came in two pin-compatible versions: one with a 32-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU in a 4-Plus-1 arrangement and one with NVIDIA's own 64-bit dual-core CPU, codenamed "Denver." NVIDIA said Tegra K1 supported DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.4 and tessellation, could run Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, and was the first mobile processor to support CUDA.

Tegra X1 followed on January 4, 2015. It used a 256-core GPU based on the Maxwell architecture of the GeForce GTX 980 and eight CPU cores (four ARM Cortex-A57 and four Cortex-A53) on a 20 nm process. NVIDIA rated it at more than one teraflops, twice the performance of Tegra K1, and said it drew under 10 watts. The same announcement introduced the NVIDIA DRIVE car computers built on Tegra X1, including DRIVE CX, a cockpit platform for digital clusters, infotainment and head-up displays.

Parker (Tegra X2, 2016)

At the Hot Chips conference in August 2016, NVIDIA detailed the Tegra SoC codenamed Parker. The Register reported that the 16 nm FinFET chip, fabricated by TSMC, has 256 Pascal CUDA GPU cores and six 64-bit ARMv8 CPU cores, two of NVIDIA's own Denver 2 cores and four Cortex-A57 cores. NVIDIA rated it at 1.5 teraflops on 16-bit floating-point values. The Register described Parker as NVIDIA's system-on-chip for self-driving cars: two Parker chips were used in NVIDIA's PX 2 car computer, and the SoC includes CAN bus interfaces, hardware virtualization and a separate safety management engine. Press coverage also calls Parker the Tegra X2.

Generations

Tegra generations covered in this article

Chip	Announced	CPU	GPU	Notable XR-related use
Tegra APX 2500	February 2008	ARM11	GeForce graphics core	None
Tegra 600 / 650	June 2008	ARM11	GeForce graphics core	None
Tegra 2 (Tegra 250)	January 2010	Dual-core Cortex-A9	Low-power NVIDIA GPU	None
Tegra 3	November 2011	Quad-core Cortex-A9 plus companion core	12-core GeForce, stereoscopic 3D support	None
Tegra 4	January 2013	Quad-core Cortex-A15 plus companion core	72-core GeForce	GameFace Labs headset prototype
Tegra K1	January 2014	Quad-core Cortex-A15 (32-bit) or dual-core Denver (64-bit)	192-core Kepler	Tango tablet development kit; GameFace Labs prototypes
Tegra X1	January 2015	4x Cortex-A57 + 4x Cortex-A53	256-core Maxwell	Jetson TX1 module
Parker (Tegra X2)	August 2016 (Hot Chips details)	2x Denver 2 + 4x Cortex-A57	256-core Pascal	Magic Leap One; Jetson TX2 module (used in the GameFace Labs Head Mounted Console)

Use in VR and AR devices

Nintendo Switch and Labo VR

Nintendo revealed the Switch on October 20, 2016. On the same day NVIDIA wrote that the console "is powered by the performance of the custom Tegra processor," with an NVIDIA GPU based on the same architecture as its GeForce graphics cards. NVIDIA also said it had built custom software for the console, including a revamped physics engine, new libraries, game tools and APIs, and described the development as 500 man-years of effort. The console launched on March 3, 2017, at US$299.99 in the United States.

The Switch became a VR device through Nintendo Labo. The Labo VR Kit, which Nintendo announced in March 2019 for release on April 12, 2019, is a cardboard holder for the console with lenses that show each eye one half of the screen for a stereoscopic view. Road to VR noted that the Switch's 1,280 x 720 display limited each eye to an effective 640 x 720 at most, and expected rotational (3DOF) tracking only.

Google Tango tablet

In June 2014 Google's Advanced Technology and Products (ATAP) group announced the Project Tango tablet development kit, a 7-inch Android tablet for developers working on mobile 3D sensing. It used a Tegra K1 with 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage, a motion tracking camera and integrated depth sensing. CNX Software reported that the Kepler GPU gave the tablet OpenGL 4.4 support. The kit was announced at US$1,024 and offered in limited quantities to professional developers.

Magic Leap One

The Magic Leap One Creator Edition went on sale to developers in selected US cities in August 2018, at US$2,295. Its processing and battery sit in a separate puck, the Lightpack, which Magic Leap's published specifications list as containing an "NVIDIA Parker SOC" with two Denver 2.0 and four ARM Cortex-A57 64-bit cores (two A57 cores and one Denver core accessible to applications), a Pascal GPU with 256 CUDA cores supporting OpenGL 4.5, Vulkan and OpenGL ES 3.3+, 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. Engadget's summary of the iFixit teardown identified the chip as the "Tegra X2 'Parker' SoC."

GameFace Labs prototypes

GameFace Labs built a series of Android-based standalone VR headset prototypes on NVIDIA hardware. In April 2014 Road to VR reported that the company's earlier prototypes used Snapdragon 800 and Tegra 4 chips and that its next one was being built around a Tegra K1 board. In May 2018 the company opened applications for a US$599 developer kit of its Head Mounted Console (HMC), built on the Jetson TX2 module with a Pascal GPU. According to Tom's Hardware, the HMC ran Android 7.0 as a standalone headset and could also tether to a PC for SteamVR content, with SteamVR (Lighthouse) tracking.

Jetson and XR research

Jetson is NVIDIA's line of embedded boards and modules, and its early members were Tegra-based. bit-tech dates NVIDIA's push into the embedded and automotive markets to the Jetson K1 single-board computer, released in March 2014 at US$192 as a nod to its 192 CUDA cores, and replaced a year later by the Jetson TX1 module; NVIDIA lists the boards as the Jetson TK1 and TX1. Road to VR described the Tegra K1 as "also known as 'Jetson'," and NVIDIA's Linux for Tegra documentation identifies the Jetson TX1 as a Tegra X1 series platform. NVIDIA unveiled the Jetson TX2 on March 7, 2017, as a credit card-sized platform that "delivers AI computing at the edge," with a 256-core Pascal GPU, dual Denver 2 and quad Cortex-A57 CPU cores, 8 GB of LPDDR4 memory and 32 GB of eMMC storage, drawing less than 7.5 watts. The release listed its operating system support as "Linux for Tegra." bit-tech identified the TX2's processor as the Tegra X2 Parker SoC.

Researchers have used Jetson boards to stand in for the processors of mobile headsets. The ILLIXR project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an open-source end-to-end XR system with an OpenXR-compliant interface, measured its pipeline on a desktop PC and on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier development board in two power configurations. The authors chose the embedded board because it approximates the hardware and power rating of commercial mobile XR devices, and wrote that the Magic Leap One "used a Jetson TX2," which they described as similar in design and power rating to their Xavier configuration.

Software

NVIDIA's Linux board support package for Tegra was published as "Linux for Tegra" (L4T). The R24.2 release, for example, supported the Tegra X1 series on the Jetson TX1 developer kit and included Vulkan, OpenGL 4.4 and OpenGL ES 3.1 support. NVIDIA now calls the package the NVIDIA Jetson Linux Driver Package, still abbreviated L4T; the R32.7.5 release supports Jetson AGX Xavier, Jetson Xavier NX, Jetson TX2, Jetson TX1 and Jetson Nano modules. As of October 2026, NVIDIA's latest release is Jetson Linux 39.2.1 (an L4T Ubuntu 24.04 distribution) within JetPack 7.2.1, which supports the Jetson AGX Thor developer kit, Jetson T5000 and T4000 modules and the Jetson Orin family.

See also

• NVIDIA
• Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2
• System on a chip
• GeForce
• CUDA