NVIDIA Jetson TX2 Linux Benchmarks

Last week we got to tell you all about the new NVIDIA Jetson TX2 with its custom-designed 64-bit Denver 2 CPUs, four Cortex-A57 cores, and Pascal graphics with 256 CUDA cores. Today the Jetson TX2 is shipping and the embargo has expired for sharing performance metrics on the JTX2.

NVIDIA sent over the Jetson TX2 last week for Linux benchmarking. Unfortunately due to all of the GTX 1080 Ti and Ryzen Linux testing last week, there aren't as many Jetson TX2 results to deliver today, but I have a fair number of test results to share and will only be posting more Jetson TX2 benchmark results in the days ahead.

As a reminder, the Jetson TX2 is based around a new "Tegra X2" SoC with Pascal graphics and on the CPU side there is a 64-bit Denver 2 CPU and four Cortex-A57 CPU cores. The codename for the Jetson TX2 as exposed by the system information appears to be Quill.

The Jetson TX2 packs 8GB of 128-bit LPDDR4 memory, a big upgrade over the TX1's 4GB 64-bit LPDDR4 memory, and thus there's much better memory bandwidth at 58.4 GB/s vs. 25.6 GB/s. Onboard storage is 32GB eMMC, double that of the JTX1's 16GB eMMC.

The Jetson TK2 with JetPack 3.0 L4T is making use of the Linux 4.4.15 kernel. Linux 4.4 was the current Long-Term Support release during the hardware's bring-up, which is why they used that kernel, while Linux 4.9 LTS wasn't around at that time. But they are working to mainline Jetson TX2 work and they are hoping some of it may be ready for Linux 4.12. It's also interesting on the kernel side to note that with their Tegra CPUFreq driver they are using the schedutil governor for making use of the Linux kernel's scheduler utilization data, one of the newer governors to the Linux kernel. With the Jetson TX1 they were using the interactive governor.

As covered in last week's article, there are two operating modes for the Jetson TX2: MAX-P and MAX-Q. MAX-P is designed for maximum performance in delivering up to twice the performance of the JTX1 at less than 15 Watts. The MAX-Q mode is for maximum efficiency and aims for twice the performance-per-Watt of the JTX1 at less than 7.5 Watts. The MAX-P and MAX-Q modes can be changed via the nvpmode binary present on the Jetson TX2's stock file-system. There are some MAX-P vs. MAX-Q benchmarks in this article while more will be coming up in future Jetson Linux benchmarking articles.

The developer board for the Jetson TX2 is basically the same as with the Jetson TX1 and the JTX2 module is interchangeable with hardware designed for the JTX1 module.

The Jetson TX2 Developer Kit is priced at $599 USD for retail and $299 USD for verified student developers.