Tegra X1 Delivers Stunning Performance On Ubuntu Linux

The crew at Phoronix has put NVIDIA's Tegra X1 to the test running Ubuntu Linux. I don't want to spoil the review but they used words like "exciting" and "stunning" when talking about performance.

NVIDIA's Tegra X1 64-bit ARM SoC running (non-Android) Linux is a beast! I was given access to a SHIELD Android TV that was configured to run Ubuntu Linux, which has led for some exciting benchmarks. In some workloads, the Tegra X1 comes up just shy of an Intel Core i3 "Broadwell" system. The Tegra X1 has me very excited about the future of ARMv8 hardware on Linux and NVIDIA's continued Tegra advancements.

Finally good to see arm chips competing with Intel. Sure it's on the extreme low end of the mobile or desktop market but it's at least a start. More interesting is the fact it's competing with a chip almost a full node below it in gate size and 50% higher in TDP. Makes me wonder if 10W TDP on X1 has been verified.

Hopefully the rise of arm chips allows for cheaper and more powerful gaming consoles with yearly refresh cycles. I like my ps4 and all but by the time it's EOL it will be way under powered.

Dawill said:

Finally good to see arm chips competing with Intel.

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Other than Blowfish (accelerated crypto extensions) and C-Ray (decent SIMD performance), the quad core X1 trades blows with the almost 2 year old Atom-based Celeron N2820 (2c/2t) in general CPU performance in the other benchmarks. It's not that impressive.

The $199 media box does look interesting as a hackable low power system, at least if running Linux is important. The new Braswell based Celeron Intel NUCs can be configured with a HDD and memory for about the same price and offer similar performance.

pxc said:

Other than Blowfish (accelerated crypto extensions) and C-Ray (decent SIMD performance), the quad core X1 trades blows with the almost 2 year old Atom-based Celeron N2820 (2c/2t) in general CPU performance in the other benchmarks. It's not that impressive.

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True enough, though the Cortex-A57 is a bit aged as well. I think nvidia just wanted to get the GPU out there and for its intended market didn't care so much about the CPU considerations. It seems like they put Denver on the shelf until TSMC can sort out their issues.

I'm too lazy to check but it's possible the X1 was running 8 threads so that could explain its performance in any highly-threaded benchmarks.