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NVIDIA Releases JTX1 ARM Board That Competes With Intel's Skylake i7-6700K (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: NVIDIA has unveiled the Jetson TX1 development board powered by their Tegra X1 SoC. The Jetson TX1 has a Maxwell GPU capable of 1 TFLOP/s, four 64-bit ARM A57 processors, 4GB of RAM, and 16GB of onboard storage. NVIDIA isn't yet allowing media to publish benchmarks, but the company's reported figures show the graphics and deep learning performance to be comparable to an Intel Core i7-6700K while scoring multiple times better on performance-per-Watt. This development board costs $599 (or $299 for the educational version) and consumes less than 10 Watts.
The "deep learning" benchmark is a GPGPU workload which does practically nothing on CPU.
Nvidia has just made a SoC Chip that has about equally fast iGPU than what Intel has, for a lower energy consumption.
But in CPU performance, the Skylake is MUCH faster.
This is just a particular benchmark that happens to run entirely in the GPU.
Just because its low power does not means it have the same performance.
In performance per watt, Intel and ARM are mostly the same .
And I'd like to see actual benchmarks, not "We used CUDA based benchmarks that are designed to run well only on Nvidia GPUs!" As a benchmark, as last I looked Intel had the best performance per watt GPUs around.
The article is silly. Who would buy a i7-6700K purely for the GPU. If you want that kinda gpu power you can get a dedicated graphics card for much less.
what could/would I do with one as a layman with a passing (but growing) interest?
You could buy one and leave it in the box, then post vague questions on Slashdot that don't give any hint as to what your project actually is :p
For some parallel tasks it could be cost effective. A TFLOP of GPU with only 10 watts is nothing to sneer at. It might even be lower watt/flop then an FPGA, which tend to be power hogs. Of course, the 10 watt figure is for the card form factor SOC only, so the power and size is greater for the SOC plugged into the carrier board. And the cost needs to come down quite a bit for their likely market place. Either the price falls by a huge amount or it goes nowhere.
Even so, this could be interesting for some niche markets.
Why is Snark Required?
And I'd like to see actual benchmarks, not "We used CUDA based benchmarks that are designed to run well only on Nvidia GPUs!" As a benchmark, as last I looked Intel had the best performance per watt GPUs around.
And I'd like to see actual benchmarks, not "We used CUDA based benchmarks that are designed to run well only on Nvidia GPUs!" As a benchmark, as last I looked Intel had the best performance per watt GPUs around.
Of course they use benchmarks that run well on CUDA. Some algorithms can't be parallelized effectively over hundreds of GPU cores. Other algorithms can take a hit due to the branching required. However, there are some real world applications that can be effectively parallelized on CUDA that really make sense.
Theres no point in comparing algorithms poorly suited for GPUs. NVidia might as well throw in the towel now for those applications. However theres a reason why OpenCV contains so many CUDA implementations of algorithms that have already been written for CPUs. I guarantee it's not because programmers get off on writing CUDA versions(although it's possible some do). It's because these CUDA versions actually provide speedups.
Given that the X1 can be used in embedded systems, you must understand the architecture and your algorithm to decide if the X1 is well suited for your application.
being equally fast as intels graphics is like crowing about beating a legless man in a foot race.
This thing is for when you're doing something that can benefit from GPGPU, and a R-Pi isn't providing enough CPU power. The obvious example is machine vision, and I'm pretty sure that's the prime example that nVidia actually gave when announcing the thing: robotics. It's got a tiny little power footprint, which is the advantage over something from intel.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, and if they break the NDA they are uninvited from future events, won't receive demo units for evaluation and I think may have to pay some damages. I find this a bad relationship, as the press acts as puppets, but that's how it works...
being equally fast as intels graphics is like crowing about beating a legless man in a foot race.
The only ones you'll hear complaining about Intel's built-in graphics are the PC gamers and benchmarking sites. I'm actually quite happy downgrading from a Core i3-3227U to a Pentium N3700.
My virtual 8-bit CPU in my Minecraft world has enough oomf...