Jetson TX vs. Jetson TX1 development board

Dear all,

I am pretty much new to the Jetson TX1 platforms and would really appreciate if you could help me clarify the following issues:

1- What is the difference between “Jetson TX1” vs. “Jetson TX1 development kit”? I suppose “Jetson TX1” refers to the processors (CPUs+GPUs) whereas the development kit includes the “Jetson TX1” processors plus some additional peripherals, is this right?

2- If the “Jetson TX1” refers to the processors only, then, is the “Jetson TX1” detachable from the development kit so that it can be used in other hardware designs directly? Is this the common recommended approach to use the programmed processors (detached from the development kit) in arbitrary hardware designs of our choice?

3- How good is the performance of Jetson TX1 in deep convolutional networks inference stage? (if anyone has some experience in this context)

many thanks,
Shervin

The Tegra X1 is a system on a chip (SoC). Normally it can only be purchased permanently soldered to a small circuit board (the Jetson TX1 module). That module needs to be seated on something similar to a motherboard specifically designed for that module (system on a module, SoM, gets mounted on a carrier board). Several people sell various carrier board, the one sold by nVidia is designed for developers to have good access to most features, but is perhaps not good for a field device (e.g., it’s a bit big and has things you don’t need if using it in a vehicle or aerial drone). When you purchase the developer kit you get the module pre-mounted on the developer carrier board.

FYI, the Jetson TX1 uses the Tegra 210 chip, which is the tegra21x series. Everything else around it is the module board, carrier board, or board support package. When using the module on the developer carrier board you’ll see some references to “p2597” and “2180”. This is the identification of the module’s circuit board and the carrier board circuit board. References to tegra210 are references to the specific chip, references to tegra21 or tegra21x are references shared in common to all variants of the Tegra TX1 chip.

Jetson in general is a reference to GPU SoC products sold by nVidia based on those Tegra chip series which support GPU and which have some sort of board support (something like an older Tegra3 only has board support from third party vendors and won’t use “Jetson” in the name). So a Jetson TX1 implies the tegra210 on its module and developer carrier board. The older Jetson TK1 is the tegra124, or tegra12x series. Note that the Jetson TX1 developer kit has a camera which comes with the developer carrier board.

The Jetson TX1 developer kit’s module can be unscrewed from the developer board and seated on other boards. You could test things out on a developer board and then later plug it in to a third party carrier board. Part of the board support package of software would require changing, though the module portion would remain constant. The whole purpose of making this as a module which can be separated from the carrier board is for the exact reason of making it possible to use the same module both for development and for use with a custom carrier board. The carrier board can evolve while keeping the module constant.

I don’t know how to compare neural network performance on the TX1 with other solutions, but what I’ve seen is that other platforms are typically used to train neural networks, and the TX1 is good at using those pre-trained networks with anything you might want to put on a drone or vehicle.

Hi arashloo,

The JetPack 2.3, our latest software suite of developer tools and libraries for the Jetson TX1 takes the world’s highest performance platform for deep learning on embedded systems and makes it twice as fast and efficient.

The ability to run complex deep neural networks is key for intelligent machines to solve real world problems in important areas such as public safety, smart cities, manufacturing, disaster relief, agriculture, transportation, and infrastructure inspection.

Read full blog post at [url]https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/09/12/jetpack/[/url]

Thanks

To clarify…does the Jetson TX1 development kit include the Jetson TX1 Module (SoM) that is installed on a carrier board like the Astro Carrier for NVIDIA® Jetson™ TX1?
[url]http://www.connecttech.com/sub/Products/ASG001.asp?l1=GPU&l2=ASG001[/url]

Compared to this carrier board, what additional functionality does the development kit include? E.g. Can I do development on the module installed in a carrier board?

Thanks

The development kit comes with a module mounted on a development board.

I don’t know how the other carrier board differs. You’d need a USB port set up for being able to run in device mode after putting the unit in recovery mode…this would be the way you flash. Does this other carrier board have a recovery mode button? I don’t know.

You’d also be at somewhat of a disadvantage if you don’t have a serial console ability…I do not know if this other carrier board is set up for serial console or not. So flash plus serial console are the real minimum requirements for development.