Hello all, I’m here inquiring about the possibility of using the recently announced Jetson Xavier NX as a general purpose PC. Now I’m sure your first question is “why would you want to use an AI developer board as a general purpose PC”. I get it $400 is creeping into consumer desktop territory but I have a few reasons.
- I want my main computer to be incredibly tiny. In an SBC form factor
- This seems to be the most powerful (and expandable) SBC on the market.
- Power Draw. With a 10-15W TDP depending on the mode this has better perf/watt than any desktop I’ve owned.
For a while I used a Raspberry Pi 3 and then later a 4 as my main desktop. I have a stake in ARM Linux and honestly just love SBC form factors. However the Pi 4 is just ever so slightly too slow for everything I want to do with it. The CPU actually isn’t the issue.The GPU is what prevents me from running several available applications at reasonable speeds (especially games!). Also the lack of an officially supported 64 bit ARM OS on the Pi is an issue for several apps despite some valiant efforts by the community. My main use case is web browsing, emulation, and light gaming (and yes the games I want all work on Arm Linux in one way or another).
So with all that defense out of the way. Would this fulfill my desires? I have no issues compiling programs from source should I have to. What I’m worried about is if there’s some unknown out there. For example maybe the GPU drivers not fully supporting the latest OpenGL, or maybe the web browsing performance is crap, or basic software applications like Libre Office aren’t available.