Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has confirmed the company is working on Project Kayla, an initiative that combines a Tegra 3 chip and an unspecified GPU on a mini-ITX type of board.
Although the graphics and chip company is still reluctant to share additional details about Kayla, the folks at AnandTech describe the project as an early development platform for running CUDA on ARM.
“While Nvidia’s first CUDA-capable ARM SoC will not arrive until 2014 with Logan [the next-gen Tegra SoC], Nvidia wants to get developers started early,” explained AnandTech’s Ryan Smith.
“By creating a separate development platform this will give interested developers a chance to take an early look at CUDA on ARM in preparation for Logan and other Nvidia products using ARM CPUs, and start developing their wares now.”
According to Smith, Kayla is essentially a platform whose specifications are set by Nvidia, with ARM PC providers building the final systems. As expected, the CPU is (currently) a Tegra 3 chip with 3GB, while the GPU is based on Kepler architecture and paired with 1GB of RAM.
“Kayla is a development platform for ARM on CUDA as opposed to calling it a development platform for Logan; though at the same it unquestionably serves as a sneak-peak for Logan,” Smith noted.
“This is in big part due to the fact that the CPU will not match what’s on Logan – Tegra 4 already is beyond Tegra 3 with its A15 CPU cores – and it’s unlikely that the GPU is an exact match either.”
Early version of Kayla remain on track to be available later this year.
