A team of researchers in China has demonstrated how a low-cost Nvidia Jetson TX2i system-on-chip for industrial applications can significantly enhance capabilities of hypersonic weapons — achieving speeds above Mach 7, according to a report by the South China Morning Post. This SoC, which is not restricted by U.S. export controls and is much more affordable than high-end options, could enhance China’s military capability.
The Nvidia Jetson TX2i processor (featuring two Denver 2 cores, two Arm Cortex-A57s, and a Pascal GPU with 256 CUDA cores) was originally designed for industrial applications but has been adapted by the research team to work within air-breathing hypersonic aircraft. These aircraft benefit greatly from the chip’s ability to process complex computational fluid dynamics models. This processing power reduces the time required for crucial calculations — from seconds to just 25 milliseconds.
Economically, using the TX2i module means a significant reduction in research and development costs for hypersonic technologies. With a peak performance of 1.26 FP16 TFLOPS at up to 20W, the TX2i offers substantial computational power at a fraction of the cost of Nvidia’s more powerful AI chips.
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