It will be an early development platform for CUDA on ARM

Mar 20, 2013 07:48 GMT  ·  By

At present, NVIDIA's CUDA computing technology is fairly extensively used by PCs, professional systems and supercomputers, but that only goes for the x86 CPU architecture.

As one might guess, the company doesn't want CUDA to be restricted to “normal” CPUs forever, especially when the ARM architecture is making such progress.

Already, there are servers based on ARM, and PCs are just one or two years away at this point.

Having hardware that enables CUDA on ARM isn't really enough though. Software developers still need to actually make programs for it, and adjust existing ones to be compatible.

Knowing this, the corporation has prepared Kayla, a platform made of a Tegra 4 SoC with an unknown graphics processing unit and a mini-ITX motherboard.

Those who have seen our report about the updated Tegra roadmap will know that Logan (Tegra 5) will arrive in 2014.

It so happens that Logan will be the first CUDA-capable ARM SoC. This won't really help if there isn't any supported software at launch.

That is where Kayla comes in: a separate development platform that will let developers prepare for the arrival of the chip.

Tegra 3 was chosen because the PCI Express bus is needed to attach a GPU. It will be backed by 2 GB of RAM.

According to PCGamesHardware, the GPU has two SMX units (384 CUDA cores), ruling out the GK107. It is not the minimum CUDA core number (192), but it is still low, which makes a strange sort of sense. Developers don't really need to do anything but ensure support, and the low resources level will act as incentive for optimization.

In any case, the GPU will have 1 GB of memory to work with, separate from the 2 GB mentioned before.

Oddly enough, NVIDIA made a point of calling Kayla a development platform for CUDA on ARM, instead of Logan. The CPU won't match the Logan's, so that, again, makes sense.

Finally, OpenGL 4.3 is supported, meaning that tessellation, compute shaders, and geometry shaders are present, unlike on current SoCs that only have OpenGL ES 3.0 (and, thus, lack such things).

Kayla will be made available by year's end (2013). Official updates will be available through this page.