The ability to take Jetson cards is actually a really strong point in its favor IMO. Raspberry Pis by themselves aren't incredibly interesting in clusters except for pedagogical reasons, but with some Nvidia cards running whatever on CUDA, maybe with some RPis mixed in to do management/support tasks, and the built-in BMC, this could be pretty sweet for the right task.

I'm not sure these NVidia cards are very powerful. One decent GPU in a PC may blow several clusters of these out of the water. I haven't checked, though.

In raw performance, probably. The benefit these have (at least purportedly) is they're very energy efficient, consuming little power (and generating little heat) for comparatively large throughput.

So I can imagine someone wanting a few of these on a desk, running inference on some models or something, maybe as a small back-end for a hobby project. It may still be more power efficient to just use regular GPUs, but I suspect these win out because of the tight coupling between "CUDA cores" and the CPU.

Now, is that worth spending a bunch (many hundreds) of dollars on a carrier board and these Jetson modules? For me, no, but I at least see why it may appeal to some people.

Isn't cable management a pretty inconvenient thing? This also includes a switch. You need plenty of cables to replace this.

Not trying to minimize cable management, just trying to see if I'm missing anything here or not :)

I guess it is. But I suspect the price (as it's usually the case with "cool" rpi things) isn't going to look like one of a cable management solution. INB4: $200

The entire purpose of a PCB is cable management ;)

Ha, that's a good one... also somewhat true! By extension, ASICs really are just about cleaner PCB layout.

(Yes, yes, there are non-aesthetic physical, electrical, designed, and parasitic effects of cables vs PCBs and vice-versa. Spoil-sport.)

> ASICs really are just about cleaner PCB layout

ASIC's are just very small PCB's with all discrete components etched on the same material ;-)

Yes, exactly, thus tidying ('mother') PCB layout in the same way that a PCB tidies all the cables into a small arrangement with all discrete components fixed in the same plane.

These connect Pi Compute Modules, which are distinct from regular a Pi in a few ways (eg they don't function without a host board of some sort, so don't have certain things on board like network connectors, GPIO etc) but putting that aside, you'd get to a reasonably similar place if you hooked up some regular Pi's, it's simply more wires with the regular ones.

I think the biggest differentiator here is direct access to the PCIe bus and SATA that doesn't go via USB - that's something you can't get on a normal Rpi.

It's not just the networking. Which would be awkward enough. It's also power and IO/Storage.

Just take a look at the PI Clusters people have built, the volume is a few times that of the boards alone.

Also, the CM4 is a bit cheaper than a comparable "complete" SBC, though I don't know if you'd come out ahead with the price of the board.