Hacker News Reader

Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Same as it's always been: Gaming. I bet even this $59 computer can play games surprisingly well. Obviously not modern AAA titles or anything like that, but there's many decades' worth of games it can play (including ones originally released for non-PC platforms). There's lot of interesting Pi-powered handhelds and mini-arcade setups running emulated games; this seems like it'd be significantly better at that.

View on HN

Gaming is not the purpose of GPU accelerated single board computers. Though you could reasonably play some games on the Jetson Nano, Nvidia markets the jetson series as embeddable machine learning systems. While there may be complaints of how hot the jetson gets or its performance with Ubuntu, the jetson is not intended to be used as a personal computer. It’s cheaper than dirt machine learning access. I highly recommend it as a way to get started in AI or CUDA with the smallest price barrier possible.

I said it was a use case, not the purpose. But realistically these single board computers are more suitable for gaming than for machine learning. If you don't have a computer at all then I guess you could use a Jetson for this purpose, but a real computer would be much better and is easily within the budgets of most companies and most software engineers.

Is this a developing markets play? I've never heard of someone whose only computer is a Pi/Jetson. By the time you add all the necessary peripherals to use it as your only computer, it costs more than a cheap laptop.

So the point of a Jetson is .. you only have a cheap laptop with terrible integrated graphics, and for $60 you get a much better GPU with this Jetson, and you remote into it?

I think it'll do better in gaming.

It's an arm cpu dude, it can't run anything other than emulators basically. And the bottleneck there is the cpu, not the gpu

ETA Prime already did a emulation, seems to have enough grunt to run some GameCube/Wii games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xrRxz5633I

Compared to him testing on a Raspberry Pi 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4TyYU9Xhcs

(note both those videos are a old so results could be different now)

The video is a year old, but I imagine there would be less bugs now. With this cheaper board coming out, there might be a bit more of development activity.

There is a fairly decent subreddit around single board computer gaming: https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming/ .

None of those emulators need accelerated graphics in the form of the Nvidia GPU and emulators for the ARM platform most likely can't even use it as most of these SBCs don't have anything like that.

This Jetson really isn't a platform to run emulated games - for that there are much better boards, with more RAM. Which is a lot more important issue. You can't do miracles with 2GB of RAM.

Jetson is made for computer vision, neural networks and signal processing, where the GPU isn't used as a GPU but as a massively parallel co-processor to crunch through a lot of data at once.

> Same as it's always been: Gaming.

No, not even close. It's embedded systems with GPU acceleration, mostly for machine learning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com