Nvidia's $1,100 AI brain for robots goes on sale

Re:Nvidia's $1,100 AI brain for robots goes on sale by mark_l_watson on Sunday December 16, 2018 @09:43AM (#18693217)

Impressive compute in a small form and running on 10 watts. Also interesting going after a non-consumer market although I think the chip would be a good fit in a handheld gaming device that supported some inputs from watching the player and had the power for very interesting/fun ‘game AI.’

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Nvidia's $1,100 AI brain for robots goes on sale by srcmap on Sunday December 16, 2018 @03:02PM (#18694880)

Not sure if 10 watts CPU can work in any handheld gaming device:

A typical 3000 mAH cell phone battery would last only 18 minutes of time just for 10 watts CPU alone, adding Display, wifi, DDR, etc would be less.

For automobile connected or wall powered devices (robot), 10 watts for CPU/GPU power is fine.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Nvidia's $1,100 AI brain for robots goes on sale by aseipp on Sunday December 16, 2018 @04:38PM (#18695426)

The Nintendo Switch uses the Tegra X1 which fits in a traditional power profile of ~10W, but it is somewhat downclocked (about 1/2 the OOTB specs) to drive that power usage down more, helping achieve its current battery life. So a 10W part can absolutely work, if you scale down the clocks a little bit. The Switch uses a 4310 mAh battery, for reference.

In contrast, the TX2 in "MaxQ" mode (energy efficiency savings mode) achieves close to equivalent performance on many benchmarks to the TX1 at half the power budget, so it has 2x the energy efficiency overall.

The real question is where Xavier lands on the power/efficiency curve here, but I'm betting it would be pretty good, and there's nothing to necessarily disqualify a downclocked part, here. I think a custom version of Xavier could make a good gaming part, if it wasn't for the cost being outrageous.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Nvidia's $1,100 AI brain for robots goes on sale by llukas on Sunday December 16, 2018 @11:03AM (#18693600)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch

This has Tegra X1.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Nvidia's $1,100 AI brain for robots goes on sale by monocasa on Sunday December 16, 2018 @02:11PM (#18694581)

I'm not sure a JITing ARM->VLIW core like that is the best choice for a game console. It'd probably lead to all sorts of weird perf inconsistencies that are hard to track down.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Nvidia's $1,100 AI brain for robots goes on sale by dejv on Sunday December 16, 2018 @10:36AM (#18693476)

Havent tried Xavier yet, but I am using TX2 in my work (which is previous generation of this type of device) and CPU is very weak to allow any serious gaming.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Nvidia's $1,100 AI brain for robots goes on sale by tonyarkles on Sunday December 16, 2018 @11:12AM (#18693650)

Anecdotally, a friend has been using TX2s and got a Xavier to test out. He was blown away by the performance delta. It’s got an octocore ARM for a CPU, and while I don’t recall what the TX2 has... that’s a lot of CPU cores to work with.

I’ve got a Xavier sitting on my desk too, but haven’t played with it much. Running OpenCV on it and doing some light live video processing was really smooth.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Nvidia's $1,100 AI brain for robots goes on sale by dejv on Sunday December 16, 2018 @11:18AM (#18693674)

For games you usually want smaller number of high performant cores than many lesser performant. Haven't done much game programming in recent years, but I still remmember the terror of programming PS3 Cell CPU.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Nvidia's $1,100 AI brain for robots goes on sale by twtw on Sunday December 16, 2018 @11:58AM (#18693856)

Were the CPU cores of Cell (PPEs) hard to program? I had the impression that the difficulty of the Cell was in the need to manage the 8 SPEs, not in writing software for the Power4 core.

The 8 core Carmel CPU in Xavier is not like the SPEs in Cell.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Nvidia's $1,100 AI brain for robots goes on sale by dejv on Sunday December 16, 2018 @01:33PM (#18694363)

It was hard to utilise all those cores. I am sure game architectures evolved during the years, but back then we didn't know how to split the code to optimally utilise all available resources.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Nvidia's $1,100 AI brain for robots goes on sale by aseipp on Sunday December 16, 2018 @04:23PM (#18695331)

Do you consider the Switch "serious gaming" or do you mean "serious graphics"? I don't know what "serious gaming" means and I doubt it means anything really, but in terms of raw performance: The TX2 default config will be somewhere around 4x more powerful than the (default downclocked) Tegra X1 in the Switch and everything from the CPU to the GPU is far more powerful at every metric, and it has better power consumption at basically every point on that curve.

"Weak CPU cores" does not mean anything, you have to couple it with a metric or comparison -- the Switch has a locked, 1Ghz quad core A57+A53, and it does just fine for a huge amount of games...

[ Parent | on HN ]