NVIDIA Launches the Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial Module, Complete with Lockstep Cluster Engine

NVIDIA has announced a new entry in its Jetson embedded computing family, and this one's designed to fit in to some of the harshest environments around: the Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial module.

"From factories and farms to refineries and construction sites, the world is full of places that are hot, dirty, noisy, potentially dangerous — and critical to keeping industry humming," says NVIDIA's Barrie Mullins by way of introduction to the company's new product. "Robotics and automation are increasingly used in manufacturing, agriculture, construction, energy, government and other industries, but many companies have struggled to incorporate the benefits of AI and deep learning in the most demanding applications."

"With the new NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial module, NVIDIA is making it possible to deploy AI at the edge in harsh environments where safety and reliability are critical priorities."

Designed to sit in the Jetson lineup alongside the existing Jetson AGX Xavier module, the industrial variant is designed to be considerably more rugged. NVIDIA has rated the part as operational between -40°C and 85°C (-40°F to 185°F), surviving vibrational forces of 10-500Hz at 5G and shocks of up to 50G for 11ms — and more, while non-operational. Better still, it can do all this over a claimed 10-year operating lifespan.

It's not just the module itself that's more robust: NVIDIA has added what it describes as a "safety cluster engine," a pair of Arm Cortex-R5 real-time processing cores operating in lockstep. "The Cortex-R5," Mullins explains, "which is in an always-on domain, can be used for safety and error correction functions."

Elsewhere, the module shares its specifications with the non-industrial variant — including a 512-core NVIDIA Volta GPU with 64 Tensor Cores, two NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) coprocessors, two vision accelerators, and an eight-core NVIDIA Carmel Arm-based CPU. The memory, meanwhile, includes error-correcting code (ECC) support on both the system RAM and the video memory.

"Built with components tested to demanding industrial standards and including new functional safety capabilities," claims Mullins, "it’s able to withstand severe shock and vibration and extreme temperature ranges. And it’s pin-, software- and form-factor compatible with the existing Jetson AGX Xavier module, so upgrading is easy."

The NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial module will begin shipping in July, with pricing set at $1,449 — a hefty increase over the non-industrial variant's $999.