[smg]

The cheapest Volta GPUs I have seen so far cost over 2K for 12GB. Can the GPU provided in this kit be used for training?

[dchichkov]

Yes, if your model is small enough or, if you are fine-tuning small number of layers. TendorFlow 1.15 and 2.0 are available on Xavier. I understand that PyTorch could be built as well.

Nite that the number of CUDA kernels and amount of memory available is smaller, if compared to descrete Volta GPUs.

[fizixer]

You say it can do training for small models because of the presence of the small (512-core) GPU? (plus maybe some left-over, control calculations by the CPU)

[corysama]

It's a low-wattage device. It's performance can't hold a candle to a last-gen card that uses 10X the power.

[fizixer]

Nope, the use of the words 'edge' and 'inference' in the tag-line pretty much mean there is no learning, no training.

[wmf]

Does it have "fake" tensor cores? Aren't those for training?

[fizixer]

You still need tensor cores for inference. But they don't do weight updates. Learning/training is all about updating the weights (through backpropagation or whatever).

So another way to put it: its tensor cores do feed-forward calculations, but no backpropagation, and no weight updates.

[rrss]

The hardware and platform is capable of training just fine. It's just rarely done because it is slower than training on pretty much any discrete GPU.