NVIDIA Giving Away 50 Jetson TK1 Development Kits

By Benjamin Young

Looking for a powerful embedded solution for your computational project? NVIDIA is giving away 50 of the boards to developers in the United States with the top ideas for implementations here. Winners will also gain full access to the CUDA ZONE tools, SDKs, and reference materials; get to it quickly though, entries must be submitted by April 30th!

Jetson TK1

The board boots to NVIDIAs Linux For Tegra (L4T) Ubuntu, with the 3.10.42 kernel, directly out of the box with the chipset’s drivers preloaded. The Jetson sports the following hardware:

  • 4+1 2.3GHz quad-core (with power saving core) Cortex A15
  • Kepler GPU with 192 CUDA cores (for reference, that’s as much as a stock GTX 460 released with)
  • 2GB of RAM supporting 64-bit memory addresses
  • 16GB onboard eMMC

The Jetson also comes with quite an arsenal in terms of I/O:

  • Half mini-PCIE slot
  • SD card slot
  • HDMI
  • 1 USB 3.0 port
  • 1 USB 2.0 micro port
  • 9-pin RS232 serial port
  • Realtek’s ALC5639 with mic and output
  • Realtek’s RTL8111GS Gigabit Ethernet
  • SATA data port
  • Molex output

Jetson I/O

There’s also an expansion board option available that will add GPIOs, UART, i2c and a few other signal types. The native software stock will support CUDA 6.0, OpenGL 4.4, and OpenCV with which to harness the full power of the 192 computational cores. Sadly though, there doesn’t seem to be a released TDP for the kit other than the vague assumptions that can be gathered by the fact that it runs on an external power brick. Though, according to January’s numbers from NVIDIA at CES, we could see a pull of as low as 5W.

Tegra K1 Die
Tegra K1 Die

If you don’t manage to get your entry submitted/chosen or if you’re just more of a curious tinkerer, you may preorder the dev kit at through NVIDIA for $1 per CUDA core at a grand total $192.