NVIDIA's Tegra X1 Delivers Stunning Performance On Ubuntu Linux

First up are the NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV benchmarks compared to a few low-power x86/ARM/MIPS devices... Prominently, the Intel Celeron N2820 Bay Trail NUC, Intel Compute Stick with Atom Z3735F SoC, Intel Core i3 5010U Broadwell NUC, CompuLab Utilite with Freescale i.MX6 quad-core Cortex-A9, the NVIDIA Jetson TK1 development board with Tegra K1 SoC, the MIPS Creator CI20, and then the SHIELD TV PRO with this new X1 SoC.

The test systems are centered around Ubuntu but due to various ARM constraints, the SHIELD TV PRO with remote access running Ubuntu 14.10, etc, there are some obvious kernel/compiler differences. However, most of the systems are on Ubuntu 14.10/15.04.

The Tegra X1 SoC for John The Ripper's Blowfish was running much faster than the Atom/Celeron Bay Trail SoCs tested and not too far behind the speed of a Core i3 Broadwell 5010U NUC. The Core i3 5010U has a 15 Watt SoC while it boasts two cores plus Hyper Threading with a clock frequency of 2.1GHz. It will be interesting to compare the performance-per-Watt of these devices once having physical access to an X1 system. The X1 was four times faster than the K1 for this John The Ripper crypto test.

With the C-Ray multi-threaded ray-tracer, the Tegra X1 was coming up just shy of the Core i3 5010U still but not much faster than the Tegra K1.

The Stockfish chess engine ran much faster on the Tegra X1 than the Jetson TK1 development board, but here its performance ended up being just behind the Celeron N2820 Bay Trail part.