Now that NVIDIA is shipping its Jetson board to developers, some of the first real-world tests of the company’s new Tegra K1 processor are starting to appear.

Members of the Phoronix/OpenBenchmarking community have posted initial results, and it looks like NVIDIA’s new chip has raw processing power that’s comparable to Intel’s Celeron J1900 Bay Trail processor.

nvidia jetson tk1

The Celeron J1900 is a quad-core, 64-bit, x86 chip with a TDP of 10W. It’s aimed at low-power desktop computers.

NVIDIA’s processor, by comparison, is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 chip aimed at mobile and embedded devices such as tablets and in-vehicle systems. What makes it special is the 192-core graphics component which is based on the same Kepler architecture as NVIDIA’s notebook chips.

The Phoronix test results primarily look at CPU speed while running Linux distros such as Linux Mint, Arch Linux, and Ubuntu. It’ll be interesting to see how the Tegra K1 fares against the competition when running Android or Linux 3D and HD video tasks that take advantage of its graphics technology.

Update: Michael Larabel at Phoronix has shared more benchmarks, comparing the Tegra K1’s CPU performance against other ARM and low-power x86 chips.

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11 replies on “NVIDIA Tegra K1 benchmarked: Competitive with Celeron Bay Trail”

  1. Eeeee waaaant 😛 Unfortunately the UK has been stiffed, $192 in the US vs £199 in the UK, US price should come to £140 after VAT has been added but nope.

  2. I wonder why the Jetson board uses a fan instead of a small passive heatsink since it supposedly has a 5 W TDP. Of course, how a chip maker measures TDP can vary. For example, the TDP numbers from Intel and AMD can’t be compared directly. Has NVIDIA provided documents on how they measure their SoC’s TDP?

      1. Nvidia’s reference boards typically show their SoC under max wattage to show max performance…

        They did the same thing when they introduced the Tegra 4… And it takes some time before they optimize the power enough to finally put it into a fan less system…

        Take the time between the Nvidia Shield release and the first tablet for what to expect with this release… Though, it may be a bit faster as they’re mainly just upgrading the GPU with this release…

        So don’t really expect CPU performance to be much better than Tegra 4 for final devices but it should be a good graphical update…

        Until the 64bit version gets released later but that’ll be a dual core… So, we’ll see…

      2. Ya, the previous Tegra 4 development boards were passive. I wonder why NVIDIA went with an actively cooled one this time.

        1. That’s why I was wondering. The previous dev boards were passive. Obviously, most of the chips on consumer devices will likely be underclocked to keep thermals down but, even at 11 W, the dev board could still be passively cooled without a huge awkward heatsink.

          It’d still be nice to see some official or reliable links on how NVIDIA measures TDP on their SoCs.

    1. don’t go !!! please come ……. sooner. hope to be released soon on a decent price (max 150$) with all features functional (i mean hw video decoding on linux)

      1. I’d pay that once the drivers are confirmed to be working well. My other concern is about cases. This is a developer board which is likely meant to be used without a case but I’d use it for home use purposes and a nice case would be preferable. Finding a case may be difficult if this doesn’t become popular among non-developers. If I make my own then it’d look pretty ugly.

        1. Maybe you could use a few standoffs and just mount it in a small desktop case, assuming that modifying things isn’t a problem for you.

          1. That goes back to my subjective concern about looks though since I like looking at my stuff. The case would still be somewhat big even if I get a mini-ITX case (haven’t looked up the dimensions of the board yet) and the ports won’t look nice out the back. I’d rather opt to make my own case out of acrylic or aluminum as my last resort for a case. It might look a little better. Maybe I’ll just hide the board by mounting it on the underside of a desk/shelf/drawer and place a basic cover on it using the mounting holes.

            Who knows. Maybe in the end I’ll get a NUC board and one of the nicer looking passive cases for it and try next time for an ARM desktop.

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