NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Launched Cheaper Arm and Ampere

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AdrianBc

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Mar 29, 2021
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The prices for the 2 Orin Nano modules, $200 for the 4 GB version and $300 for the 8 GB version, are very good, unlike for most NVIDIA products, which are high-performance, but overpriced products.

Having 6 Cortex-A78 cores, even if only at the very low 1.5 GHz clock frequency, is much better than what is offered by any other ARM solution in this price range.

Unfortunately, unlike for the previous Jetson generations, for which cheap development boards have existed, it appears that NVIDIA will not offer any development boards for the Orin NX or Orin Nano modules, because it is claimed that software development for them can be done using the super expensive ($2000) Orin AGX development boards.

So, as an individual or small business hoping to use these reasonably priced modules for any application, you will have to wait until next year and hope that by then there might appear some 3rd party which will design and manufacture some general-purpose board with peripheral connectors, for hosting the Orin Nano modules, and that they will sell such a board at an acceptable price and not at a price making an Orin Nano system as expensive as the much more powerful NUC-like computers with Intel or AMD CPUs.
 
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A-W-A

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May 14, 2022
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I noticed on the Auvidea site in their shop the Quad carrier Xavier board now states Orin NX compatibility Link

This could possibly suggest that other dev boards that are Xavier NX and nano compatible may also be compatible with the Orin Nano and NX - The Seeed Studio Mate board would make an outstanding little Orin cluster box.
 
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AdrianBc

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Mar 29, 2021
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Thanks for the link.

However, it does not seem that there will be a single board compatible with both Xavier NX and Orin NX.

On the page from that link it says that you can order now a carrier board for "for the Jetson Nano, TX2 NX or Xavier NX".

It also says that "Orin NX will be available in mid September".

So it appears that there are two incompatible carrier boards, thus it does not seem likely that any board designed for Xavier can also be used for Orin.

In any case, Auvidea is a company that should be monitored by whoever is interested in Orin NX or Orin Nano, because they might introduce carrier boards for them in the future.

I have an NVIDIA Xavier NX developer board, which was reasonably priced and which had a good set of peripheral ports, so I hope to see similar boards for the much more powerful Orin modules. Even Orin Nano is much more powerful than Xavier NX, whose Carmel cores were slower than Cortex-A75 and more than twice slower than the Cortex-A78 @ 1.5 Ghz of Orin Nano, and whose Volta GPU with 384 CUDA cores was slower than even the GPU of the cheapest Orin Nano version (Ampere with 512 Cuda cores).
 

AdrianBc

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Mar 29, 2021
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This is slightly misleading, because the $100 increase gets you 4GB more RAM and 512 more cores. $100 for 4GB of RAM alone would be rather spendy!
While you are right, NVIDIA themselves refer to two of their newest products as "RTX 4080 with 12 GB VRAM" and "RTX 4080 with 16 GB VRAM", even if the differences between those 2 boards are much greater than the differences between the 2 Orin Nano modules.

The two "RTX 4080" boards use different GPU chips, while Orin Nano 4 GB uses the same chip as Orin Nano 8 GB, Orin NX 8 GB, or Orin NX 16 GB, it just has 512 Ampere CUDA cores disabled in comparison with those 3, and also lower CPU and GPU clock frequencies in comparison with Orin NX.

Also the hardware video encoder is disabled in Orin Nano in comparison with Orin NX (the video decoder is still enabled).