Investigating NVIDIA's Jetson AGX: A Look at Xavier and Its Carmel Cores
by Andrei Frumusanu on January 4, 2019 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- NVIDIA
- SoCs
- Xavier
- Automotive
- Jetson
- Jetson AGX
Closing Thoughts
Usually at the end of an article we’d be coming to a conclusion. However as this piece is more of a hands-on, we'll limit our scope a bit. We're not really in a position to properly determine how Xavier stacks up in the robotics or automotive spaces, so that's going to have to remain a discussion for another time.
We had a quick, superficial look at what NVIDIA would be able to offer industrial and automotive costumers – in that regard Xavier certainly seems to offer a ton of flexibility and also significant raw processing power. It’s clear that the one aspect in which NVIDIA tries to promote Xavier the most is its vision and machine learning capabilities, and here, although we lack any great comparison points, it does look like NVIDIA is able to provide an outstandingly robust platform.
For most AnandTech readers, the most interesting aspect of the Jetson AGX and Xavier will be the new Carmel CPU cores. Although a deeper microarchitectural analysis of the core was out of the scope of this article, what does matter in the end is the resulting performance and power characteristics, which we did measure in detail. Here NVIDIA’s results landed in relatively modest territories, with Carmel landing at around, or slightly higher performance levels of an Arm Cortex-A75.
Multi-threaded performance of Xavier is great, although again the rather odd CPU cluster configuration can result in scenarios where not all eight cores are able to perform at their peak performance under some circumstances. As Arm tries to enter the automotive sector with dedicated IP, I do wonder if in the future it will make sense for NVIDIA to continue on with their rather exotic CPU microarchitecture.
The challenge to NVIDIA then is how to best stay ahead of Arm and the army of licensees that will be implementing their automotive-focused IP in the future. I think the one aspect where NVIDIA can offer a lot more value than competing products is the fact that NVIDIA is creating a strong software ecosystem and development toolkits, allowing customers to more easily achieve enable their product use-cases.
The Jetson AGX development kit costs a whopping $2500 (It can be attained for $1299 if you are part of Nvidia's development programme) – and even the individual modules are $1100 – making it non-viable for the hobbyist looking to use it as a server machine at home. But for companies looking to setup more complex systems requiring heavy vision processing, or actually deploying the AGX module in autonomous applicaitons for robotics or industrial uses, then Xavier looks quite interesting and is definitely a more approachable and open platform than what tends to exist from competing products.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
51 Comments
View All Comments
xype - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
AnandTech is my reminder to turn the ad blocker back on if I turned it off for some reason. It’s insane how big of improvement in experience it is to block ads on AnandTech.Cellar Door - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
It is just a matter of time before we will get a message 'turn of your adblocker to proceed' - at that point I will abandon this site. For now, ublock origin keeps this site in check for me.DanNeely - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
FYI, 99% of the time I've found I could block notice complaining about having blocked various 3rd party malware distribution domains and still read the site with my crap blockers running.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
Or just use the anti ad blocker blocker in ublock origin.HollyDOL - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
I have to admit, AT taught me to install adblock, the level of ad annoyance climbed too high for me.I am still willing to pay a sub for a spam-free AT access.
linuxgeex - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
It was THG that got me using AdBlock, but these days I turn off AdBlock on most of the sites I frequent and instead rely on ScriptSafe and Stylus to selectively disable the cruft. It's a little more work for me, but it allows sites I care about to still get revenue from the less annoying ad content, and I cross my fingers that they will learn to insert less annoying ads. Animated = blocked. Sound = bocked. Video = blocked. Causes content to jump around while loading = blocked. Inserts ads that look like navigation features = blocked (I'm looking at You, Google)Ryan Smith - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
"Why are there video ads automatically playing on each one of the Anandtech pages?"Our publisher (Future) has decided that they want to have this ad unit on every page. Unfortunately there's not much more I can say than that; it's their call.
thesavvymage - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
:(thesavvymage - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
Could you at least speak to them on ad appropriateness? Mine are the usual low effort clickbait spam ads, or "The One Thing All Cheaters Have In Common" and "Seattle: Cable Companies are furious over this tiny device".Like I understand your publishers have to advertise, but crappy advertising like this gets the adblock treatment, point blank. Its an extremely frustrating experience for what is supposed to be a professional site.
Ryan Smith - Saturday, January 5, 2019 - link
"Could you at least speak to them on ad appropriateness?"It's something we discuss on a regular basis. Like any other ad-supported operation we're largely at the whims of the overall advertising market: who is willing to buy ads and at what price. On the whole, advertisers are being very cautious right now, especially with written publications.
Future's size helps a lot with this, since they're a top publisher and can move some very large deals. Not that it's a dire situation or anything nearly like that, but continual erosion in ad rates makes it difficult to get any ads rolled back.