Linux 5.18 Adding Audio Support For NVIDIA's Orin SoC

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 5.18 Adding Audio Support For NVIDIA's Orin SoC

NVIDIA's Orin SoC with twelve Cortex-A78AE CPU cores and Ampere graphics should be quite a strong offering when it's more broadly available later this year. This "Tegra234" SoC has been seeing work on enabling it with the mainline Linux kernel and the latest fruit of that work is a new HDA audio driver set for introduction with Linux 5.18...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Orin-Tegra234-Audio

[brucethemoose]

"it's more broadly available later this year"

For (puts pinky on mouth) one MILLION dollars!


Seriously though. I'd want a laptop with one of these, assuming it idles with reasonable efficiency... and assuming it doesn't cost $3k :/

[Siuoq]

I so wanted cheap mediatek laptops, too bad that the USA, EU, GB and Chinese governments are still in the pocket of Ms and Intel

[brad0]

I so wanted cheap mediatek laptops, too bad that the USA, EU, GB and Chinese governments are still in the pocket of Ms and Intel

No, no you wouldn't. Cheap means you'll be receiving something crappy. There is a reason 99% of netbooks were / are sitting on shelves collecting dust not that long after they were introduced.

[Emmanuel Deloget]

"it's more broadly available later this year"

For (puts pinky on mouth) one MILLION dollars!


Seriously though. I'd want a laptop with one of these, assuming it idles with reasonable efficiency... and assuming it doesn't cost $3k :/

It's very possible that the SoC itself will cost between $400 and $800 in volume, maybe even more (based on prices I got for similar beasts with less A78 cores), so a whole laptop will probably be around $3K -- which is a shame, as the world really needs an affordable yet powerfull ARM CPU that can compete with Intel and AMD offerings.

The spec of Orin seems to target heavy IA operations, so it seems the CPU is not suitable for labtops (as seen by NVIDIA). The price for the new Jetson AGX Orin is still unknown, but it's going to be more expensive than the current AGX Xavier ($900).

Future will tell... (whoa... what a platitude )

[brucethemoose]

It's very possible that the SoC itself will cost between $400 and $800 in volume, maybe even more (based on prices I got for similar beasts with less A78 cores), so a whole laptop will probably be around $3K -- which is a shame, as the world really needs an affordable yet powerfull ARM CPU that can compete with Intel and AMD offerings.

The spec of Orin seems to target heavy IA operations, so it seems the CPU is not suitable for labtops (as seen by NVIDIA). The price for the new Jetson AGX Orin is still unknown, but it's going to be more expensive than the current AGX Xavier ($900).

Future will tell... (whoa... what a platitude )

Well thats exactly why I want it, all those tensor cores (and the huge GPU memory pool) would be perfect for ML dev/testing or for content creation apps. Orin would be more capable than the M1 Max or a traditional dGPU Nvidia laptop (with a limited memory pool/slower PCIe connection) in lots of workloads.


And it would be great for gaming if DLSS worked via a driver toggle... alas, Nvidia must be Nvidia and *not* do that.

[polarathene]

Well thats exactly why I want it

I'd advise a bit of caution. The hardware is often great specs wise, but their past products have shown how stagnant the support with updates gets. As far as I know, mainline support is poor, you can't use other distro or newer kernels. For example look at Jetson (same applies to latest Xavier AFAIK), you are stuck with L4T OS/distro by nvidia, which while receiving regular updates, remains on Ubuntu 18.04 base with a 4.9 kernel... Even though we've had Ubuntu 20.04 for a while now and soon 22.04.

Misses out on quite a bit of improvements/fixes since then, but it's required I believe due to the hardware drivers/firmware or something (docs mention it), and while there's been work in the past to try leverage newer kernels by the community, those efforts halted a while back last I checked. It was one of my bigger concerns for choosing not to invest in it, as nice as the hardware is on paper.

If you aren't bothered / affected by that, and it meets your needs for computation, their embedded products seem pretty sweet. I wouldn't think it to be great for desktop usage though. Who knows, maybe they'll rebase to Ubuntu 22.04 at some point, at least for newer product lines, or maybe only for Orin? That might at least be somewhat reasonable for a while if they continue the same issue that L4T currently has.

[brucethemoose]

I'd advise a bit of caution. The hardware is often great specs wise, but their past products have shown how stagnant the support with updates gets. As far as I know, mainline support is poor, you can't use other distro or newer kernels. For example look at Jetson (same applies to latest Xavier AFAIK), you are stuck with L4T OS/distro by nvidia, which while receiving regular updates, remains on Ubuntu 18.04 base with a 4.9 kernel... Even though we've had Ubuntu 20.04 for a while now and soon 22.04.

Misses out on quite a bit of improvements/fixes since then, but it's required I believe due to the hardware drivers/firmware or something (docs mention it), and while there's been work in the past to try leverage newer kernels by the community, those efforts halted a while back last I checked. It was one of my bigger concerns for choosing not to invest in it, as nice as the hardware is on paper.

If you aren't bothered / affected by that, and it meets your needs for computation, their embedded products seem pretty sweet. I wouldn't think it to be great for desktop usage though. Who knows, maybe they'll rebase to Ubuntu 22.04 at some point, at least for newer product lines, or maybe only for Orin? That might at least be somewhat reasonable for a while if they continue the same issue that L4T currently has.

Oh, yeah, thats a deal killer for me, especially if that means CUDA is held back as well.


I was talking hypothetically anyway, as I don't need a Orin board, as fun as it would be to play with, and there's precisely 0 chance of one showing up in a portable laptop.

[Paradigm Shifter]

I'd advise a bit of caution. The hardware is often great specs wise, but their past products have shown how stagnant the support with updates gets. As far as I know, mainline support is poor, you can't use other distro or newer kernels. For example look at Jetson (same applies to latest Xavier AFAIK), you are stuck with L4T OS/distro by nvidia, which while receiving regular updates, remains on Ubuntu 18.04 base with a 4.9 kernel... Even though we've had Ubuntu 20.04 for a while now and soon 22.04.
<snip>

Absolutely. If I could give this more likes, I would. Because while I loved my Jetson Nano in the early days, it quickly became apparent that support was basically, "we gave you a working OS, what else do you want?! What do you mean, updates?!" An enterprising chap on their forums shoehorned in L4T to Ubuntu 20.04, but getting other OSes (or newer kernels) to work is... eeeehh...

I'm really quite interested in getting a Xavier dev board, but the price and the historically abominable support really puts me off.

What I'd like to see is a dev board with one of these and a pair of SO-DIMM slots and pair of NVMe slots (plus USB3.whateverTheFastOneIsRightNow...). Yeah. One can dream, right?

[rbanffy]

Well... At least support has been mainlined, so you'll get updates for them. As for price, I'm not optimistic. Looking at the Jetson AGX Orin board doesn't strike me as a good platform for a portable. We can get away with the 12 cores and it'd be really nice to land machines with lots of low-performance cores into the hands of Chrome and Firefox developers so they make software better suited to large numbers of cores (because we are not going back to few fast cores, ever)