Everything You Need To Know About The NVIDIA Jetson TX1 Performance

With NVIDIA advertising the Jetson TX1 as a super-computer module with "unmatched performance under 10W", power consumption was one of the items to interest me a lot. Below is a look at the AC system power draw while running graphics, CUDA, and CPU benchmarks on the Jetson TX1. Unfortunately, per-test power consumption metrics and the automated performance-per-Watt metrics of the Phoronix Test Suite are unavailable at this time. For measuring the AC system power consumption I use a WattsUp Pro USB power meter, which exposes itself as a USB serial device. Unfortunately, the JTX1's kernel doesn't seem to have support for USB serial devices and thus was unable to interface directly with it from this development board. As a result, I was just able to monitor the AC system power consumption from a secondary system. So while it mentions "timed idle", that was just the task of the secondary system that was recording the AC system power consumption while the Jetson TX1 was running various benchmarks.

During the OpenGL tests that were run first is when the Jetson TX1 spiked the highest: 16.2 Watts. However, during the CPU tests the average system power consumption was well below 10 Watts. When there were CUDA tests running, the AC system power draw was about 13 Watts. The overall power draw during all of this benchmarking was 9.1 Watts, which is below NVIDIA's 10 Watt advertisement. When idling, the system power draw was under 5 Watts. It would be really interesting to see some independent power efficiency tests with the Jetson TX1, albeit the lack of USB serial support in its kernel is currently blocking that from happening.

While those tests were running on the Jetson TX1, from that system the MONITOR=all environment variable was set so that the Phoronix Test Suite would would be monitoring various system sensors, including temperatures. As shown by the result above, the average system SoC temperature was 44C during benchmarking. The heatsink on this Jetson TX1 is quite large and there is a fan, but that fan only turns on when needed. Most of the time, the fan doesn't need to turn on. The minimum system temperature was 29C with a peak of 55C during the most demanding test cases.

During the Caffe deep learning test, the system temperature was hovering just above 40C.

When running Gfxbench and stressing the Maxwell GPU is when the temperature began to steadily rise.