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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

This device really is a GPGPU with co-ordinating processor bolted on. Any notion of it being for the ever-nebulous Internet-of-Things is just marketing nonsense, but if your task relies mainly on GPU compute capacity per dollar this thing looks amazing.

If you haven't played with non-fixed pipeline GPUs then you probably should as your intuition about how much compute capacity they have is probably off by an order of magnitude.

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At the recent show in Asia, Nvidia was keen to promote the video input side of these smaller GPU chips - with particular reference to self-driving cars. In their vision, each car is going to need approx. 8 cameras, and each of these is going to require dedicated 3D-analysis on the video in real time (object localization, identification, etc). (#cars * 8) makes #GamerPCs look small...

It's seems like a great device for IoDCT, "Internet-of-Display-Connected-Things", as well as the upcoming IoTTS, "Internet-of-Things-That-See".

(I see now why "IoT" is popular. You can take any established computing application with a boring old name such as "computer vision" and thingify it into an acronym of exciting new cloud frontiers.)

I suddenly imagined a cross function device: I don't see why dropping in a new car stereo should not hold a board like this able to process camera and sensor data for my own use, as well as aggregating for research. I'd love, for example, there be standard physical mounts for cameras and sensors, in front and tail lights, above the rearview, in wheel arches, and a data backplane. One of these, plus a display, would make a nice in car entertainment hub, and barely use the GPU abilities, which could switch to cams, or alert me to tire wear, or even ground condition. If connected to a ECU (regs ahead, sure, but..) you might damp steering input to deal, with camber, or unload the suspension at a corner if a object looked like a puncture risk. Maybe someone should make aftermarket lamp assemblies that accommodate bullet style cams. Would take some handy optical calculations. I think automotive sensing needs a boost for collecting data by affording accommodation to such retrofits, without causing people to do hardware mods, that are likely needing certification or plain ugly, and make a supplier alliance for anonymized data. Opt in, I hope, as nobody's done a good job of instilling trust much, but i'd go for it. As for Internet of Things ideas, driver driven vehicles might be able to broadcast data useful for driverless cars. The need is for retrofitting cars as much as hoping new models will sell, as this is the sort of thing that I imagine would be a option. Make it part of something people want, like strong GPU for mapping, and you might have a deal.

Just a related thought to having GPU and vision input on cars. Get enough data and you can start finding the optimal lines through corners. It's a bit theoretical, to sell as a economy feature, or maybe just a little bit premature, but as above, I really do want more GPU horsepower on my GPS device, beyond what mobile phones can supply.

I think it is UPS trucks that Nokia HERE maps rig with LIDAR scanners. I'd like more of that to happen and become public data. Nokia seem to have the majority of auto manufacturers in deals, Microsoft didn't get to buy that bit of the company clean, and I bet they've thought about how to extend journey data capture. That's potentially a nice ecosystem to have strength in, as qualifying anything that my interact with car control is a substantial barrier to entry.

Which leads mw to wonder how long it will be until, assuming someone gains access to a platform, compiling a Google maps street view dataset is possible on a budget. Maybe that is Nokia's plan...

I am wondering if you can add an external GPU via the mini pcie interface:

http://www.hwtools.net/Adapter/PE4C%20V2.0.html#Web-Shop

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