
Nvidia Unveils First Mobile Supercomputer for Embedded Systems - kailuowang
http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/Releases/NVIDIA-Unveils-First-Mobile-Supercomputer-for-Embedded-Systems-ad8.aspx
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sharpneli
If they would only stop hating OpenCL (read: Actually support it) I'd purchase
one in a heartbeat as a testing rig and experimentation rig.

Having a board which works only with a certain vendor specific API is not
really that useful unless I'd specifically want to develop a full fledged
product using exactly that particular board.

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madeye
This SDK will have fully support of OpenCL 2.0

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thomasjames
Do you have a link for that? I would be super excited to see them get back on
top of their OpenCL support. They have been a 1.1 for a long while now.

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jxjdjr
So many posters here do not have a clue. Can I use it as a media server? So
its similar to parellela! Xyz is better, cheaper, faster... People - This is
the beginning of an epic shift in focus. We are at beginning of an exciting
new period for computing. The focus is shifting to function - out there in the
real world. The goal behind this nvidia drive is no less than the creation of
useful real world robotics. This marks the very beginning of a curve that will
take us all the way to west world. As long as the semiconductor industry keeps
cranking out the production nodes, this story will remove humanity from the
process of production -forever. You are here at the beginning, you are here to
bear witness, don't let the gravity of this moment escape you.

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zackmorris
I totally agree. This is so long overdue!

My only gripe is that I decided to look at OpenCL and CUDA today and felt kind
of.. underwhelmed. I have a lot of OpenGL experience and I guess it's not
surprising that they are so similar to framebuffers and shaders. But I was
really hoping for true general purpose computing, more like a hybrid between
VHDL and say MATLAB. Ideally it would work like Go, where you would send a
C-style function off to an execution unit or refer to other units by id, and
use something like fork/join to tabulate the results, and maybe just give up
on the notion of a global memory space. Instead it looked more like image
processing kernels for doing convolutions and stuff, and I mean that's great,
but didn't exactly wow me.

Maybe I'm missing something fundamental? Does anyone know of a site with more
of a computer science approach, say like
[http://golang.org](http://golang.org), instead of so much emphasis on
graphics? Or possibly a compiler that would convert Go/MATLAB/Python to
OpenCL/CUDA? Am I alone in feeling a little mystified here?

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dman
I hope Nvidia throws more support behind this than they did with past Tegra
developer kits. I bought a Tegra devkit and perpetually got the feeling that
the driver support / dev relations was being done by one person in their spare
time.

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hershel
This looks pretty similar to the parallela, with better price, nicer software
support and better manufacturing horizon.

Oh well, that was somewhat predictable: parallela competed with nvidia in
something that nvidia cared about and could execute.

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trhway
no, they are very different.

NVIDIA is SIMD, a 32 thread warp doing the same instruction in lockstep (in 4
cycles usually on 8 SPs, the 192 SP chip can run 24 warps simultaneously,
though specific numbers may change a bit from version to version) and heavily
penalized for in-warp divergence.

Parallela - i.e. Adapteva
([http://www.adapteva.com/epiphanyiv/](http://www.adapteva.com/epiphanyiv/))
is 64 independent (execution-wise) RISC cores.

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zemo
this is very cool. It operates in the "sub-10 watt space", had pretty decent
io options for a device of that size, no apparent moving parts, decent
graphics capabilities, and a reasonable price point. Seems like a great little
device for a media machine or a graphics installation; somewhere between a
raspberry pi and a mac mini.

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markhahn
192 kepler cores: don't bother. this is just a desperate attempt to get
someone to take TK1 chips off their hands. coincidentally, I'm sure, but AMD
is shipping their AM1 platform.

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fidotron
I wonder if something like this could be the start of a decent key-value
appliance. Hardware designed to perform the role of memcached on the network
or similar.

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noahl
Hmm. At first I thought this would be a waste, because you couldn't use all of
its fast compute capabilities on doing key-value lookups. But these things
also have much, much more memory bandwidth than regular CPUs (I can't remember
if it's 10x or 100x, but that ballpark), and that might work well for these
applications.

But I don't know how the GPU's memory caching infrastructure works. If the
bandwidth is only for serial reads, that could be a problem.

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wmf
K1 has about the same memory bandwidth as every other mobile SoC, which is to
say not all that much. Don't compare it to discrete GPUs.

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fidotron
True, but in my experience if you can avoid hitting the memory the amount of
computation you can do per thing is absolutely terrifying.

The main thing I had in mind here was hashing for bloom filters. i.e. do the
different algos in parallel on a GPU, then pass those values for the main
lookup to be done by the CPU.

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rch
I'm impressed by the price point ($192) and pretty curious to see what I can
do with it besides computer vision. Bioinformatics co-processor that works
with my laptop? I've wanted that for a long while now.

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robomartin
Is this for processing USB webcam data? I'd like to use industrial or
broadcast-level cameras but the board seems to be lacking support for these
kinds of inputs. Also, in both of those domains cameras can deliver true 10 to
12 bits per color channel uncompressed performance. Webcams don't come close,
as far as I know.

Am I wrong?

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wmf
Tegra 4 has a MIPI-CSI interface for image sensors and I would assume K1 is
similar. Supposedly you can combine the ISP and GPU for image/video
processing.

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kailuowang
I am surprised that no hackernews users has responded to this news yet. It
sounds an exciting platform for all kinds of innovations.

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jensnockert
The people who were interested probably bought the AMD-powered Gizmo Sphere
already? (www.gizmosphere.org)

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jmgrosen
Well, this one has about ~6x the computing power (if their numbers are to be
believed), and it has an ARM core rather than x86. Some differences at the
least.

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protomyth
Have we got non-NVidia benchmarks yet?

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rhoads
What about using this for bit/alt coin mining? Do you guys think it is a good
ratio of performance / power consumption?

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jmpe
Notice they use the GigaFLOPs metric, which is a (maximum) floating point
measure. Bitcoin hashing (it's been a while for me) is compute intensive on
integer math. For a good ratio of performance/power you'd want to look at
architectures like the GreenArray devices. But the world of bitcoin hashing is
now firmly positioned in ASICs. You can't cut architecture fat beyond that so
you'd have to look at (general purpose) architectures built on a faster
silicon technology. Wouldn't count on it.

[http://www.greenarraychips.com](http://www.greenarraychips.com)

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ramseyymcgrathh
Could be a great platform for WPA2 key cracking and encryption bruteforcing
when paired with tools like Pyrit or HashCat

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boredinballard
I wonder how many pmks it could get through per second in Pyrit. I imagine
it's a bit more power efficient than a bunch of GPUs going through pmks.

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pfraze
Anybody know if the FPGA's branching model has been improved?

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profquail
What FPGA? Do you mean GPU? If so, then - it's improved a bit over the years,
but it's still much different than CPU programming, and branching remains
relatively expensive.

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pfraze
I have my terms mixed up. I thought GPUs used FPGAs, but I was wrong. Thanks
for clearing that up.

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maximux
Could something like this work for a home server?

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pantalaimon
Why would you need a powerful GPU in a home server?

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skrowl
I've been looking for something to replace my Ouya as an XBMC box, but with
enough power to support the incoming 4K content. I'm not sure this does it.

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dublinben
You'd probably be better off waiting for a 4K codec to settle out, and for
hardware decoding support in new chipsets. As it stands, HDMI is barely
capable of pushing 4K to the handful of displays that will accept it.

