Former AI stars become abandoned: Nvidia discontinues Linux support for Tegra Xavier processors

The Xavier released in 2018 was once a rising star in Nvidia's Tegra product line, designed specifically for robots and other artificial intelligence applications with its powerful Volta graphics processor. Xavier actually has two versions: T194 and NX, with T194 being the complete version, while NX castrated some CPU and GPU cores. Although Nvidia only mentioned "Tegra194" this time, considering that NX is essentially a simplified version of T194, it is likely to be included as well.

Interestingly, among many Tegra chips, the relatively new Xavier was the first to be phased out, while some older models remained strong. The reason for this is likely that Xavier's Volta architecture is not as popular as other architectures. For example, X1 was successfully installed on the Nintendo Switch gaming console, and X2 followed X1's footsteps, with its Pascal architecture quite similar to X1's Maxwell architecture.

Except for Xavier, the Volta architecture was only short-lived in the server and professional graphics fields. The Tesla V100 and Titan V in 2017, Quadro GV100 in 2018, and CMP 100HX mining GPU in 2022 are almost all of them. In 2018, the launch of the Turing architecture further worsened Volta's situation. Although Volta has faster HBM2 memory and more Tensor cores than Turing, it lacks hardware accelerated ray tracing capabilities and has higher production costs.

In 2020, the introduction of Ampere architecture completely sentenced Volta to death. Although Volta still has more Tensor cores than Ampere's flagship GPU, its maximum 32GB VRAM is already struggling, and based on TSMC's outdated 12nm process, it is difficult to compete with Ampere, let alone the outdated CUDA core architecture and missing ray tracing support.

Considering Volta's marginal position in Nvidia's business, it is not easy for the company to provide support for it for such a long time. But Xavier's retirement may indicate that other Volta GPUs will also face the same fate.