Jetson Gets a Rocket Boost: Hands-On with the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit
It's been six months since NVIDIA's Jensen Huang took to the stage at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) '22 and unveiled the high-performance low-power Jetson Orin Nano system-on-module (SOM), targeting artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge. Now, it's GTC '23 — and Huang is back on stage, this time launching the Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit bundle with immediate availability.
Offering a claimed "80x" the performance of the Jetson Nano, the new Jetson Orin Nano is designed to bring the company's latest-generation Orin graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture to the entry level — but can it deliver on the company's lofty promises?
The Jetson Orin Nano SOM is actually available in two flavors, one being effectively half the performance of the other. The entry-level Jetson Orin Nano 4GB has, as the name implies, 4GB of LPDDR5 memory with 32GB/s bandwidth, a six-core Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU running at up to 1.5GHz, and an Orin GPU with 512 CUDA cores and 16 Tensor cores offering a claimed 20 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of INT8 compute. The Jetson Orin Nano 8GB, by contrast, doubles both the capacity and the bandwidth of the on-board memory as well as the number of CUDA cores and Tensor cores in the GPU, but leaves the CPU alone, delivering a claimed 40 TOPS.
For those looking to buy the Developer Kit, the difference is moot: it's only available with the Jetson Orin Nano 8GB pre-bundled. The carrier board, into which the SOM has been handily pre-installed, will technically accept either SOM or even one of the high-end Jetson Orin NX SOMs — but that's moot, too, as you can't buy the carrier board outside of the Developer Kit bundle.
