Everything You Need To Know About The NVIDIA Jetson TX1 Performance

Simply put, this is the best 64-bit ARM development board one can reasonably buy right now. There aren't many interesting AArch64 boards out right now, but even still the Jetson TX1 is a mighty powerful beast with its 256-core Maxwell GPU and quad-core Cortex-A57 design. Of the ARM64 boards out there right now, on the low-end are models like the 96Boards HiKey that will cost you $75 USD but have just 1GB of LPDDR3 memory and eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores with a Mali 450MP4 GPU (or a 2GB version for $100). At the high-end there is the Applied Micro X-C1 Mustang board that has an eight-core 1.6GHz APM SoC and support for up to 8GB of memory, but that board will set you back $1495 USD. The only possible competition that the Jetson TX1 might get in the near term would be the 96Boards HuskyBoard from AMD with the Seattle SoC, which will have Cortex-A57 cores but details beyond that remain scarce and the pricing information is also not firmed up. For those wanting to fit the SoC into drones or other devices, the HuskyBoard and others aren't of a modular design.

The Jetson TX1 price at $599 USD may seem a bit steep when considering the Jetson TK1 launched for $199, but here we have much more powerful hardware, a better and mini-ITX compatible design, and is one of the few 64-bit ARM development boards worth talking about right now. There is though the educational discount to put the board at $299 USD, but details for students on how to pursue that discount aren't yet clear. At $300 the price is bearable for hobbyists and those just wishing to tinker around with a 64-bit ARM desktop. If the price is too steep for you and the modular design with camera isn't important for your purposes, another alternative would be to buy a SHIELD Android TV with Tegra X1 SoC that can be found for under $200 USD with the 16GB model. From there you can hack on Ubuntu Linux to the SHIELD TV, similar to how the earlier Tegra X1 benchmarks were done here at Phoronix.

The Jetson TX1 is most worthwhile if you have CUDA/cuDNN workloads, but even still just the power of the four Cortex-A57 cores is much faster than any ARM solution of the past few years as shown in the performance comparisons to the Tegra K1, Tegra 3, Tegra 2, and the Calxeda server nodes. It was very fascinating seeing just how far Tegra/ARM performance has evolved since the Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 from just a few years ago. When comparing the CPU performance to the Jetson TX1, the CPU numbers were just comparable to old hardware like AMD Phenoms and Semprons; but with CUDA-enabled tasks like Caffe, the results speak for themselves. The OpenGL performance results for the Maxwell GPU on the JTX1 were also impressive and more than twice as fast as the previous-generation JTK1.

If you want to see how your own x86/ARM/MIPS/PowerPC/SPARC Linux systems compare to the power of the four Cortex-A57 cores on the Jetson TX1, it's very easy with the automated Phoronix Test Suite. To see how your own system(s) compare for the tests shown in the JTX1 comparison against the nearly three dozen other x86 systems tested, simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1511159-HA-BIGCOMPAR83.

Aside from the price being a potential letdown to hobbyists/enthusiasts, my only gripes with the Jetson TX1 would come down to: the JetPack installer as noted at the start of the article (I wish NVIDIA would just provide the Debian ARM packages straight away rather than having to jump through obstacles!), there are no signs of OpenCL support, the JTX1's current Linux 4 Tegra driver package continues to rely on the rather dated Linux 3.10 kernel, it would be nice to see an official/secondary Ubuntu sample file-system of say 15.10 given there's been many ARM64/AArch64 improvements in the past year when it comes to the GCC compiler support and other key packages, and the lack of USB serial support in the default kernel can be a potential letdown depending upon your needs. Due to the missing USB serial support is why there unfortunately no performance-per-Watt benchmarks to be able to share for today's article. The only other bit disappointing part is that the Jetson TX1 is being released nearly a year after the Tegra X1 was first shown; it would have been nicer and given more longevity if the Jetson development board came much earlier in the Tegra X1's product cycle. Update: There's been some software updates for the Jetson TX1.

That said, I am very happy with the Jetson TX1 ARM development board as someone who's into (non-Android) Linux performance, there are a lot of opportunities for this development board thanks to the powerful Maxwell GPU and Cortex-A57 cores, and this is frankly the most compelling 64-bit ARM development board I've seen to date. With an average power consumption of under 10 Watts, there's many possibilities and is even beefy enough to be a very power efficient Linux desktop if you're fine with the price. The Tegra X1 SoC also has excellent multimedia capabilities.

Stay tuned for more Jetson TX1 benchmarks to come on Phoronix. There will be more CUDA comparison tests coming, a LLVM/Clang vs. GCC compiler comparison as well as updated GCC benchmarks compared to the old release shipped by Ubuntu 14.04, and other updated tests. If you have any test requests please share them with me via @MichaelLarabel or via the forums. If you appreciate all of our daily Linux hardware benchmarks at Phoronix, please consider a tip or Phoronix Premium subscription. Phoronix Premium allows reading all content ad-free plus viewing multi-page articles all on a single page.

If you are interested in purchasing the Jetson TX1, you can find it available for purchase right now via Amazon.com.