NVIDIA is probably best known for making graphics cards used for gaming and video editing, but the company also designed low-power processors aimed at tablets, TV boxes, and other small gadgets a few years ago. Aside from the NVIDIA Shield Android TV box, there aren’t many devices using those chips anymore… but NVIDIA took what it learned and shifted its focus to building technology for things like self-driving cars and autonomous robots.

In 2015, the company launched the Jetson TK1 develpment kit with a system-on-a-module for robots, drones, and other autonomous machines. Two years later NVIDIA introduced the Jetson TK2 with twice the performance and a lower price tag.

Now NVIDIA is taking things to a whole new level with the new NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier, a 10 watt to 30 watt computer module that offers up to 32 trillion operations per second for deep learning and computer vision tasks.

The new module is available starting today.

It’s the most expensive Jetson module to date, with volume pricing of $1,099 per unit with a minimum order of 1,000 units. But it’s also the company’s most powerful Jetson device so far.

NVIDIA says it offers up to 20 times the performance of the TX2, and up to 10 times the efficiency.

The Jetson AGX Xavier features:

  • 8-core, NVIDIA Carmel ARMv8.2 64-bit processor
  • 512GB NVIDIA Volta graphics with 64 Tensor Cores
  • Dual NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator engines
  • NVIDIA Vision Accelerator Engine
  • HD video codecs
  • 128Gbps of dedicated camera ingest
  • 16 lanes of PCIe Gen4 expansion
  • 256-bit memory interface with 137 GB/s bandwidth
  • 16GB of 256-bit LPDDR4x RAM
  • 32GB of eMMC 5.1 storage

NVIDIA says the module can decode up to two 8K/30fps video streams at once or six 4K/60fps video streams… or up to a whopping 52 1080p/30fps streams.

There’s also an optional $1299 Developer Kit bundle that includes the compute module, an open source carrier board and a power supply. The carrier board includes dual USB 3.1 Type-C ports, a Gigabit Ethernet jack, an M.2 slot for a wireless card and another for PCIe NVMe storage, an HDMI 2.0 port, a UFS card socket and a camera connector.

Don’t need all the new bells and whistles (or can’t afford the higher price tag)? NVIDIA will continue to offer the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 line of modules and the company is introducing a new lower cost version with 4GB of RAM instead of 8GB.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers