Shulou(Shulou.com)12/24 Report--

CTOnews.com December 19 news, the former AI star Tegra Xavier processor will leave the stage, Nvidia announced the discontinuation of its Linux system support. This means that Xavier, which has been released for only six years and is equipped with Arm core and Volta architecture GPU, is officially a historical relic. This may also be a wake-up call for the future of other Volta architectures, GPU.

According to CTOnews.com, Xavier, released in 2018, was once the star of Nvidia's Tegra product line, with its powerful Volta graphics processor designed for robots and other artificial intelligence applications. There are actually two versions of Xavier: T194 and NX, where T194 is the full version, and NX castrates some CPU and GPU cores. Although Nvidia only mentioned "Tegra194" this time, given that NX is essentially a stripped-down version of T194, it is likely to be included.

What is intriguing is that among the many Tegra chips, the relatively new Xavier is the first to be eliminated, while some older models are still strong. The reason is probably that the Volta architecture adopted by Xavier is not as popular as other architectures. For example, the X1 is successfully installed on the Nintendo Switch console, while the X2 follows the mantle of the X1, and its Pascal architecture is similar to the Maxwell architecture of the X1.

Apart from Xavier, the Volta architecture is only a flash in the pan in the areas of servers and professional graphics. The Titan V100 and Titan V100 in 2017, the Quadro GV100 in 2018, and the CMP 100HX mining GPU in 2022, are almost all of them. In 2018, the launch of the Turing architecture made Volta's situation even worse. Although Volta has faster HBM2 memory and more Tensor cores than Turing, it lacks hardware-accelerated ray tracing and is more expensive to produce.

In 2020, the debut of the ampere architecture completely sentenced Volta to death. Although Volta still has more Tensor cores than Ampere's flagship GPU, the VRAM of its largest 32GB has been stretched, and it is difficult to compete with Ampere based on TSMC's old 12nm process, not to mention backward CUDA core architecture and lack of ray-tracing support.

Given Volta's marginal position in Nvidia's business, it is not easy for the company to support it for such a long time. But the retirement of Xavier may herald the same fate for other Volta GPU.

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