Investigating NVIDIA's Jetson AGX: A Look at Xavier and Its Carmel Cores

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.