Everything You Need To Know About The NVIDIA Jetson TX1 Performance

My only gripe before getting to the results is that NVIDIA still makes it a hassle to setup CUDA/cuDNN on the Jetson. While Linux 4 Tegra makes it easy to setup a sample Ubuntu 14.04 file-system and to get the NVIDIA graphics drivers working, setting up CUDA and other software is made to be an unnecessary hassle. They continue to distribute the CUDA support by running the JetPack installer, which is supposed to be done from a separate Ubuntu 14.04 x86_64 system... They just don't offer the ARM binaries outright to go and install. Besides the fact of needing to run JetPack from a separate system, it will error out immediately if you're not running Ubuntu 14.04. So I ended up having to wipe an Ubuntu 15.10 system and go back to Ubuntu 14.04. When I did setup a clean Ubuntu 14.04 system for trying to setup CUDA on the Jetson TX1, I ended up being presented with an unhelpful error code from JetPack. However, before that error appeared, all of the needed components were downloaded to a jetson_download folder and inside there... The ARM hard-float binaries in Debian packages for CUDA and friends! I'd be much happier if they would just make these Debian ARMHF packages available outright without needing to run this silly JetPack program on a separate computer to basically download them. But hey, once installing those Debian packages, all was well with my Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installation on the Jetson TX1.

It's also unfortunate that NVIDIA doesn't seem to support OpenCL on the Jetson TX1 even though they back many other open standards and their unified Linux driver does otherwise support OpenCL.

Now let's talk performance... You may notice this is a rather long article, so if you'd like to view it all on a single page, please consider joining Phoronix Premium for single-page, ad-free article viewing plus your support goes on to make other interesting Linux hardware tests possible. Thanks.

The rough ordering of tests for this article goes:

- Power Consumption
- Thermal
- Jetson TK1 vs. TX1 OpenGL Performance
- Jetson TX1 OpenGL Performance Scaling Up To 4K
- Jetson TX1 vs. TK1 vs. Raspberry Pi 2 CPU Tests
- Comparison Results To Tegra 3 & Tegra 2
- Comparison Results To The Calxeda ARM Server
- Jetson TX1 Performance Comparison To 33 Different x86 Systems
- Tegra X1 CUDA Reference Benchmarks
- Caffe AlexNet Benchmarks