NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Launched Cheaper Arm and Ampere

At GTC 2022, NVIDIA expanded its line of Jetson Orin products with the new NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano series. This new series is still in the SODIMM form factor, but it cuts a few features to also lower the price of entry. If you just need a few Arm cores, 4-8GB of memory, and a lower power envelope, then the Nano series is what you want.

NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Specs

The new Nano series expands the Jetson Orin line from four to six products. Common in them is the use of an Ampere-generation NVIDIA GPU block as well as Arm Cortex-A78AE cores. NVIDIA is going Arm, and the Jetson series is one way to start developing for that future. If you want to go higher-end, you can check out Patrick’s GTC session with a Gigabyte server, Ampere Arm CPU, and NVIDIA A100’s. This is the direction NVIDIA is heading and the Jetson series is the lowest cost option to get into the series.

If you want to see the full line of NVIDIA Jetson Orin specs, then you can check them out here:

The line spans from 512 NVIDIA Ampere CUDA cores to 2048 and 5W to 60W. Onboard there are 6-12 Arm Cortex-A78AE cores and 4GB-64GB of LPDDR5 memory. The new Orin Nano series has the same number of cores at six, but has a 4GB model with 512 CUDA cores and an 8GB model with 1024 cores. That 4GB model operates in the 5-10W range while the 8GB model operates in the 7-15W range. Just as a note here, that is not the power just for the chip, that is for the module, including memory networking and more. There is power consumption used by the boards that these are plugged into for external devices, but this is for effectively the full system.

The 8GB Jetson Orin Nano is then closer to the 8GB Jetson Orin NX. The Orin NX adds the NVDLA and video encoders to the mix.

Final Words

Hopefully, someone makes inexpensive and cool carrier boards for the Jetson Orin Nano. $199 may cover the Arm CPUs, 4GB of RAM, and some OS storage, but it still needs a carrier board to be useful. That will be a big deal. At STH we have taken a look at the NVIDIA Jetson Nano 4GB TX2 and NX Hands-on, and even reviewed the Advantech MIC-730AI NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier AI Edge Appliance. That review even included a full demo setup with a textile defect demo solution:

Next, we have the Jetson Orin Developer Kit. You may have seen that in a number of STH pieces, it is stuck behind a logjam of content, but hopefully will be out in the next few weeks as it just got updated recently. Some think of Jetson as a “toy” because it is lower cost and lower power than NVIDIA’s GPUs, but make no mistake, this product line is the future of NVIDIA with Arm and NVIDIA GPU IP together.