Yesterday at ISC I sat in another session from NVIDIA, this time on CARMA (aka CUDA for ARM or Tegra 3) by Don Becker (of Beowulf fame). This is NVIDIA looking to target developers with a very low power SoC. The board runs at a peak of 48W of LINPACK giving a single precision performance of 200GFLOPS. We were told that under normal loads the board only requires at most 25W which is pretty impressive. In its current incarnation it consists of an ARM A9 CPU attached via x4 PCIe (< PCIe 2) to a Quadro 1000M - a Fermi based laptop graphics card with 96 CUDA cores. This, coupled with 2GB of RAM. Interestingly, this is done via an MXM connection which means in the future you will most likely be able to hotswap the GPU out for another. Much more flexibility for your usage scenario. The board has an incredible array of connectors including 2x HDMI, 2x ethernet, SATA and video in to name just a few. Gives you a lot of flexibility those does make the board itself relatively large. You can of course boot it from the network or from the SD card.
Initially it will be running CUDA 4.2 (downgraded from CUDA 5 recently for some reason) on an Ubuntu 11.04 bases OS using the 3.1.10 Linux kernel.
It was murmured that in the future they might looking at fusing the two memory regions of the CPU and GPU (related to project denver) which would be awesome. Along with this, they might look at supporting ARMv8 64bit.
Basically looking at a much beefier raspberry pi..despite the price I think I would prefer this! Unfortunately OpenCL support would however have to be driven by the community and will not be done by NVIDIA (apparently).
Priced at $629 from seco - you can sign up for one now.
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