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NVIDIA is best known to gamers as the manufacturer behind the popular GeForce graphics cards and the Shield portable gaming system, but the company does a lot more than just that. They're a major force behind the processors that power mobile devices as well producing high-powered specialized computer systems for scientists and researchers with particular needs.

NVIDIA made headlines at CES 2014 with the announcement of their new Tegra K1 mobile processor, the fifth generation of the company's mobile processors and the first mobile "System on a Chip" to support next-gen graphics. The K1 features a mind-boggling 192 Kepler graphics cores, and was shown running the Unreal Engine 4 at CES in January, which many regarded as a stunning feat.

A few months after debuting the K1 at CES, NVIDIA took things a step further with the announcement of the Jetson TK1 development kit, which they've described as " a tiny but full-featured computer designed for development of embedded and mobile applications." To learn more about what the Jetson dev kit is and what it has to offer, I spoke with NVIDIA's Jesse Clayton, Product Manager for Embedded Applications.

Jesse: It's really a mobile supercomputer for embedded applications. It's a developer kit based around NVIDIA's Tegra K1 processor. The thing that is unique about the Tegra K1 is that it has the same Kepler computer core that goes in our high-end gaming systems, in our professional graphics workstations, and in the supercomputers we power. And it's all in a little package that can run in the five to six watt range under load.

GC: What do people do with the Jetson TK1? 

J: This is really targeted at two groups of people. The first group are all of the makers, the do-it-yourselfers, the researchers out there. This is a developer kit for them to really create some new things. It would lend itself really well to robotics, if somebody is working on a robot and they want to give it the ability to see and map its environment and interact with its environment using computer vision this would be a great platform for that, or if someone wanted to do a similar thing on a drone. If someone's working on some new ideas for a portable medical device, this would be a great system for that.

The second group of developers this is targeted at is people who are working for corporations for robotics, for medical devices, for security, or for defense. They would use the Jetson TK1 as their development platform for their software, then when they're ready to go to market they would have a custom board built with just the I/O that they need, which would use the Jetson TK1 as their reference design.

GC: When you actually get the kit, what comes with it? How do you start using it? 

J: When you take it out of the box, inside the box you have the Jetson TK1 board, you have the power supply, and then a USB cable for re-flashing  the device. The software is pre-installed, so you take it out of the box and plug in a keyboard, a display, and the power. You'll boot up to a command line, and you have to run a script to install the NVIDIA drivers. Then you reboot and you're rebooting to a Linux desktop.

GC: How experienced do people need to be to actually start using this kit?

J: Well it's a fully-featured computer by itself, so if you're familiar at all with using Ubuntu and the Unity desktop, that's the environment that you're going into here. It's Linux for Tegra, it's based on Ubuntu 14.04, but it really is just like a standalone computer. You have a web browser, it's a full GUI desktop, there's really no barrier to get up and running with it.

Now to really make this board shine there's two areas. It supports OpenGL 4.4, so that's the full desktop version of OpenGL, so for graphics developers this is a great platform for them. CUDA is the other area. It supports CUDA 6 to unlock all those parallel processing capabilities of the GPU. It's great for graphics developers, great for CUDA developers, great for computer vision developers using  OpenCV.

GC: Do you have any specific examples of projects that have already been built using this kit? 

J: One of our partners, GE Intelligent Platforms, we've worked with them a lot and they have a lot of CUDA expertise in-house. They had previously developed a surveillance application using an NVIDIA MXM product. They got a Jetson TK1, and they were able to port their surveillance application from an x86 base system with the MXM board to the ARM-based Jetson TK1, and have it up and running in a matter of days. They actually demoed this application at the GPU Technology Conference a month ago.

GC: How about possible gaming applications for this?

J: We aren't targeting the board specifically at that, but it's an extremely powerful processor. It supports full desktop OpenGL. It supports CUDA. It would be great for gaming applications as well, and for portable gaming applications.

GC: Is there any more information that people out there should know if they're thinking about purchasing the Jetson TK1?

J: It's important to note that it's a developer kit, so it doesn't come in an enclosure. It's qualified like a developer kit. People shouldn't be thinking of this, like, "Oh this is going to be a gaming console for me." You could use it for that, but it's not really built with that in mind.

GC: And can people actually buy this now?

J: You can pre-order now, and shipments will begin this month and next month. . 

You can learn more about the Jetson TK1 on the NVIDIA developer blog and in this detailed technical brief.