Trying Out The Jetson TK1, NVIDIA's High-End Tegra K1 Board

While it looks like most NVIDIA Jetson TK1 shipments were delayed (I've heard in Europe that they're not coming out as well until mid-May, matching what NewEgg and Micro-Center are now advertising), to much excitement I found out last night my Jetson TK1 ARM board shipped out and it's already arrived this morning. Here's my unboxing and first look at this new high-end ARM board featuring the Tegra K1 SoC that sports Kepler graphics.

NVIDIA announced the Jetson TK1 just over one month ago as one of the first widely available products (albeit, developer focused) shipping their newest Tegra K1 SoC. This first-generation Jetson TK1 features the Tegra K1 configured with four 32-bit Cortex-A15 CPU cores plus NVIDIA's fifth low-power companion core. Complementing the powerful quad-core-plus-one Cortex-A15 is a Kepler-based graphics processor with 192 CUDA cores -- NVIDIA's most powerful GPU now in the ARM space. The Kepler GPU will support OpenGL ES 3.0, CUDA 6, OpenCL 1.2, and OpenGL 4.4. NVIDIA has said the Tegra K1 is about fifty times faster than the former Tegra 2.

The Jetson TK1 also packs in 2GB of memory, 16GB of onboard eMMC memory for storage, a half mini-PCIE slot, one SD/MMC connector, and even one Serial ATA data port.

Included with this open ARM development board was the external AC/DC power adapter, four rubber feet for the PCB, one micro-USB cable, and NVIDIA's quick start guide. The power supply is +12.0V, 5.0A max and made by the FSP Group.