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by fpp 3875 days ago
The price is quite a disappointment particularly when comparing to the Shield pricing (and how long NVidia has taken to present the kit - the X1 was introduced now almost a year ago / Shield on the market since early this year).

Let's see in the next days how performance of the board stacks up once the embargo on publishing test results is over.

Remember that the 1TFlops published is FP16 not FP32.

4 comments

I think with the dev kit you're mostly paying for the motherboard-type thing and all the software.

The module itself doesn't seem that expensive, given that you're getting a top-notch ARM SoC. Personally I'd be interested in a group buy when it gets released (early next year, for $299 in 1k quantities).

The only Cortex-A72 chip that I know of is the MediaTek MT8173, and the GPU on that is nowhere close to a Tegra X1. So it's not like this is a previous-generation chip, despite being close to a year old.

Also remember that NVIDIA loves saying that this is as fast as the ASCI RED Supercomputer from 2000... but that was FP64 1TFLOP machine. This NVIDIA chip gets a total of 16 GFLOPs of FP64... a whopping 1/64 the power of the ASCI computer they try to compare it to.
I'm disappointed too - the Jetson TK1 was marketed at $192, so this is more than triple the price. Dev kit or no, their costs didn't increase that much.

Unfortunately they're pretty much the only game in town for this kind of hardware. There's a few alternatives (Parallella, FPGAs, etc) but nothing with the kind of ecosystem that CUDA provides.

Dev boards are usually priced much higher than consumer products since you usually don't have the same scale of manufacturing.