Nvidia has just opened the gates to the development of an all new generation of computer applications are set to bring about a slew of changes in our real lives. The new applications will employ computer vision, image processing and real-time data processing and to aid their development, it has launched a developer platform based on the world’s first mobile supercomputer for embedded systems.
The Nvidia Jetson Tk1 Developer Kit gives developers the tools to make frameworks and applications that can empower robots to flawlessly navigate, doctors to perform mobile ultrasound scans, drones to abstain from moving articles and cars to recognize people on foot.
With unmatched execution of 326 gigaflops which almost three times more than any comparable installed platform. the Jetson Tk1 Developer Kit incorporates a full C/C++ tool compartment dependent upon NVIDIA Cuda architecture which in turn is the the most pervasive parallel processing platform and customizing model. This makes it much simpler to program than the FPGA, custom ASIC and DSP processors that are ordinarily utilized within present embedded systems.
At the heart of the Jetson TK1 Developer Kit is the Tegra K1 mobile processor, NVIDIA’s 192-core super chip built on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture which in turn is the the world’s most advanced and energy-efficient GPU. Tegra K1’s 192 fully programmable cores deliver a level performance that is the most advanced in mobile form. The Jetson TK1 Developer Kit includes the programming tools which are needed by software developers to quickly develop and deploy compute-intensive systems.
A slew of developers and system builders in the industrial, robotics and medical fields have already expressed their support for the development platform and wish to work on the same in future.
Chris Jones, director of strategic technology development at iRobot Corporation, said: “Having the level of performance and energy efficiency Jetson TK1 offers can potentially support the development of robots with real-time object recognition and compelling autonomous navigation capabilities. Our experience with the previous generation CUDA development kit has already enabled us to make great progress training robots to interact more intelligently with their environment.”
The Jetson TK1 platform comes shod with a support for the NVIDIA VisionWorks toolkit which allows for creation applications at a pretty brisk pace courtesy of its rich set of computer vision and image processing algorithms. The Jetson TK1 Developer Kit also has a support for the CUDA 6.0 developer tool suite, including debuggers and profilers to develop massively parallel applications.
Coming to the hardware capabilities, the Jetson TK1 is the first developer platform for the Tegra K1, which hit the Launchpad at the International Consumer Electronics Show 2014. It includes 2GB memory and input/output connectors for USB 3.0, HDMI 1.4, Gigabit Ethernet, audio, SATA, miniPCIe and an SD card slot.
For the common man, this might seem like too much of information to process but if were to put the same in simpler terms, it would have meant courtesy of the mobile supercomputer from Nvidia which we’ve been talking about in detail, we are ready to witness an all new world of robotics with a high level of intelligence. The kit can be purchased for $192 in US.
