Nvidia's Jetson AGX Thor costs 3499 US dollars as a dev kit

Nvidia is modernizing its processor platform for robots. The Jetson AGX Thor follows on from the four-year-old Jetson AGX Orin. Thor brings new CPU cores, an up-to-date graphics unit, more memory and additional video capabilities.

The CPU part of the Thor comprises 14 ARM cores of the Neoverse-V3AE type – an offshoot of the Neoverse-V3 for cars and robots with additional safety certifications. Orin still relies on 12 smaller Cortex-A78E cores.

Blackwell GPU

On the graphics side, Nvidia jumps from the penultimate Ampere generation to the current Blackwell architecture. At the same time, the company is increasing the GPU from 2048 to 2560 shader cores. Nvidia claims 7.5 times more AI performance thanks to the integrated Tensor cores. However, this figure is only so high because Blackwell masters the slimmer FP4 data format. Thor thus manages a good two quadrillion computing operations per second (2 petaflops) at its peak, while Orin achieves a maximum of 275 trillion (275 TOPS) in the INT8 data format.

Memory remains connected via a 256-bit wide interface. With Thor, however, Nvidia relies on faster LPDDR5X DRAM instead of LPDDR5 and 128 GB instead of 64 GB in the maximum configuration. The transfer rate increases from just under 205 to 273 GByte/s. There is one M.2 slot each for mass storage and a WLAN card (M-Key and E-Key).

Users can configure the processor with a maximum electrical power consumption of between 40 and 130 watts. Thor can therefore consume significantly more energy than its predecessor Orin (15 to 60 watts).

Plenty of Ethernet and video

For wired networks, Thor supports four times 25 Gigabit Ethernet. Nvidia provides a QSFP28 slot for this in its own developer kit. Screens can be connected via HDMI 2.0b and Displayport 1.4a.

On the video side, Thor supports a whole squadron of streams. Decoding via H.265, for example, ranges from ten 4K streams with 60 fps each to 92 Full HD streams with 30 fps each. In the case of robots, video images are used for control.

Nvidia's own developer kit with the Thor full expansion and a 1 TByte SSD costs 3499 US dollars, the equivalent of 3005 euros excluding tax or just under 3580 euros including tax. The first retailers specializing in embedded products in Europe list the Jetson AGX Thor kit at higher prices. In addition to Nvidia's Thor board, the kit includes a housing, cooler and fan. It also runs Nvidia's complete Jetson software stack.

Nvidia sells the two pure processor variants Jetson T5000 and Jetson T4000 to manufacturers, each without a board. The 5000 version is the processor variant from the developer kit. In contrast, the Jetson T4000 is slimmed down: the GPU is slightly more than half as fast, the CPU has 12 instead of 14 cores and the RAM is halved to 64 GB.

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(mma)