The Thermal Performance Of NVIDIA's Jetson Nano $99 Developer Board

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Thermal Performance Of NVIDIA's Jetson Nano $99 Developer Board

One of the exciting product launches for this month has been the introduction of the NVIDIA Jetson Nano as a $99 Arm developer board offering four Cortex-A57 cores that isn't too special itself but packing in a 128-core Maxwell NVIDIA GPU makes this board interesting for the price. Out-of-the-box the Jetson Nano is just passively cooled by a small aluminum heatsink, but does it work any better if actively cooled to avoid any potential thermal throttling? Here are some thermal benchmarks.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=27712

[mum1989]

Hello
thanks for benchmarks
(I wait to receive mine)

but do you review at 5w or 10w ? (max) ?
there are two mode on this Jetson Nano

[SystemCrasher]

Hot and expensive - the usual hallmarks of Nvidia hardware. Active fan on ARM board? Oh lol, that sounds so much in x86 spirit. Next Nvidia SoC should try to demand some full blown ATX power supply to run I guess. Also, my personal opinion is that relying on company like Nvidia and their production for any projects is pretty much suicidal. They never care how their actions would land on heads of people actually using their hardware. So they are utterly proprietary, I've never heard of longviery/reliability/long term availability policy. At which point they are worse than even cheap chinese SoCs - you can still buy old A10/A20 SoCs or bords if you had projects using this hardware. Good luck to do something comparable with Nvidia for anyhow comparable timeframe.

So what's the point of all this? Show how cool Nvidia techs are? What for? Just to get slapped in the face, if you dare to create any project relying on that crap, when nvidia stop board/SoC production (jeopardizing your project) or screws their binary driver once again while open drivers are always second-class citizen in Nvidia's eyes? Go to hell, dear nvidia - you have been called "worst company ever" by Linus Torvalds. For a damn good reasons, which are still in effect.

[MarkG]

My Jetson Nano arrived yesterday. But, scheduled to arrive on Monday are the 4.5A power supply, cooling fan, and a faster/larger microSDXC card. I couldn't wait to play with it, so brought it up this morning passively cooled with the 2.5A power supply from my Raspberry Pi.

After applying Ubuntu updates and porting over some of my 'stuff', the heat sink became uncomfortably hot to touch, and it started to feel a bit "jumpy", where it would pause for about a quarter second at a time every few seconds. Perhaps it was throttling, or it was waiting on the sdxc card. But by the time I found all the temperatures under /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone*/temp, it cooled to the point where the heat sink was just warm.

I plan to try the benchmark suite in the coming days. So far, it's a great little board.

[wizard69]

You really can’t go by touch, the actual temperature of the die is what matters.

Basically anything electronic running over the pain threshold of most humans will fell hot. What matter is keeping the die below max operating temperature. I run into this problem all the time at work with stepper motors and servos, ultimately you just slap “hot” stickers on the steppers.

My Jetson Nano arrived yesterday. But, scheduled to arrive on Monday are the 4.5A power supply, cooling fan, and a faster/larger microSDXC card. I couldn't wait to play with it, so brought it up this morning passively cooled with the 2.5A power supply from my Raspberry Pi.

After applying Ubuntu updates and porting over some of my 'stuff', the heat sink became uncomfortably hot to touch, and it started to feel a bit "jumpy", where it would pause for about a quarter second at a time every few seconds. Perhaps it was throttling, or it was waiting on the sdxc card. But by the time I found all the temperatures under /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone*/temp, it cooled to the point where the heat sink was just warm.

I plan to try the benchmark suite in the coming days. So far, it's a great little board.

[tuxd3v]

My Jetson Nano arrived yesterday. But, scheduled to arrive on Monday are the 4.5A power supply, cooling fan, and a faster/larger microSDXC card. I couldn't wait to play with it, so brought it up this morning passively cooled with the 2.5A power supply from my Raspberry Pi.

That could be the reason because it was throttling down, not enough power..

After applying Ubuntu updates and porting over some of my 'stuff', the heat sink became uncomfortably hot to touch, and it started to feel a bit "jumpy", where it would pause for about a quarter second at a time every few seconds. Perhaps it was throttling, or it was waiting on the sdxc card.

That could also be the reason because you experience that slowdowns..
since the commits to disk were not efective..

But by the time I found all the temperatures under /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone*/temp, it cooled to the point where the heat sink was just warm.
I plan to try the benchmark suite in the coming days. So far, it's a great little board.

Can you, please, tell us what was the temperature of it?

find /sys/devices/virtual/thermal -name temp -exec ls {} \; -exec cat {} \;

That board seems nice, only 4 GB of RAM, and maybe no conector for pcie m.2?
or emmc?

Those cores( cortex A57 ) are an evolution of Cortex A53,
They should have a very close performance to BaikalT1, or even surpass it in perf/Mhz

[YamashitaRen]

Looks like Nvidia is treating you way better than Hardkernel.

[andreano]

Looks like Nvidia is treating you way better than Hardkernel.

How so? (The Odroid N2 should be comparable.)

[DanL]

Hot and expensive - the usual hallmarks of Nvidia hardware. Active fan on ARM board? Oh lol, that sounds so much in x86 spirit.

Did you even read the article, or did you just see the word "Nvidia" in the headline and instantly go into whiny rant mode?

Note: Don't answer ^that. It's a rhetorical question and you lose either way. If you read the article, your reading comprehension and/or understanding of hardware thermals need(s) help.

[YamashitaRen]

How so? (The Odroid N2 should be comparable.)

Definitely not the same coverage :

https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=partner-pub-0253814508491313:1305299758&ie=UTF-8&q=odroid+n2&sa=Search&ref=www.google.com/