In this strange period of COVID19, when you can’t meet your friends, relatives and work colleagues, when you can’t attend any kind of fairs and conferences, it’s nice to read such great news.
Today [14th May] the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, hyeld a virtual keynote for the virtual GTC2020 conference. In parallel Nvidia announced the release of another amazing new Nvidia Jetson board, the Nvidia Xavier NX.
Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX
Features
Like the latest Nvidia Jetson Nano, the new Jetson board will be sell in a little SOM module with a 260 pin SO-DIMM connector, sized only 70 mm x 45 mm offering the power of a Xavier with the size of a Nano.
Jetson Xavier NX has a GPU based on the Nvidia Volta™ technology, with 384 CUDA cores and 48 Tensor Cores that allow to perform real time operations for AI and Computer Vision application, really great for a robotic system.
The GPU is accompanied by a CPU NVIDIA Carmel ARM®v8.2 64-bit with 6 core and 8GB of 128 bit LPDDR4x RAM.
The energy efficient Jetson Xavier NX module delivers server-class performance, up to 14 TOPS at 10W or 21 TOPS at 15W.
The new board provides two Deep Learning accelerators NVDLA Engines and 7-Way VLIW Vision Processor for great performance in video and AI processing.
Applications
Jetson Xavier NX is perfect for high-performance AI systems like drones, portable medical devices, small commercial robots, smart cameras, high-resolution sensors, automated optical inspection, and other IoT embedded systems.
The Jetson Xavier NX module can now take advantage of cloud-native support, transforming the experience of developing and deploying AI software to edge devices. Pre-trained AI models from the NVIDIA NGC together with the NVIDIA Transfer Learning Toolkit (TLT) facilitate a faster path to trained and optimized AI networks, and containerized deployment to Jetson devices allows flexible and seamless updates.
Prize
The prize? Well, it’s not economic like a Nano, but 400$ is not that big amount for all this power enclosed in a board smaller than a credit card, don’t you agree?
Xavier NX vs Xavier AGX
Let’s see in a table how is the Xavier NX compared to his “big sister” Xavier AGX.
| Xavier NX (15W) | AGX Xavier | |
| CPU | 4x/6x Carmel @ 1.4GHz or 2x Carmel @ 1.9GHz | 8x Carmel @ 2.26GHz |
| GPU | Volta, 384 Cores @ 1100MHz | Volta, 512 Cores @ 1377MHz |
| Accelerators | 2x NVDLA | 2x NVDLA |
| Memory | 8GB LPDDR4X, 128-bit bus (51.2 GB/sec) | 16GB LPDDR4X, 256-bit bus (137 GB/sec) |
| Storage | 8GB eMMC | 32GB eMMC |
| AI Perf. | 21 TOPS | 32 TOPS |
| Dimensions | 45mm x 70mm | 100mm x 87mm |
| TDP | 15W | 30W |
| Price | $399 | $999 |
The Jetson Xavier NX fits between the Jetson Nano and the Jetson Xavier AGX, replacing the Jetson TX2 that is close (not so really close) to the end of its lifecycle.
Carrier boards
The development kit will be sent with a new development carrier board that must be powered with a 9-19V power adapter providing up to 5A, but the Jetson Xavier NX module is pin to pin compatible with the Nano and a Jetson Nano Dev Carrier of type B01 (the second version) can also be used.
Third party carrier boards are already available thanks to the compatibility with the Jetson Nano:
- Quark by Connect Tech
- JNX22 and JNX30 by Auvidea
- Floyd by Diamond Systems
