NVIDIA Jetson Nano: A Feature-Packed Arm Developer Kit For $99 USD - Phoronix

One of the most interesting announcements out of NVIDIA's 2019 GTC conference is the introduction of the Jetson Nano, NVIDIA's latest Arm developer board featuring a Tegra SoC. This developer board is very different from the past Jetson boards in that it's aiming for a very affordable price point: just $99 USD.

NVIDIA Jetson developer boards have historically been several hundred dollars or in the case of the latest high-performance offering, the Jetson AGX Xavier commands a $1,299 USD price. The Jetson Nano will retail for just $99 USD though obviously the performance won't match that of the AGX Xavier. The Jetson Nano Developer Kit is passively cooled but there is a 4-pin fan header on the PCB and screw holes on the aluminum heatsink if you want to mount a fan for better cooling.

With this low-cost Jetson board, the Nano is using a Tegra chip similar to what was found in the Jetson TX1 a few years back. This Tegra X1 SoC has a quad-core Cortex-A57 processor and 128-core NVIDIA Maxwell graphics... Not nearly as interesting as the X2 or AGX Xavier, but still not bad considering the SoCs usually found in sub-$100 Arm developer boards.

The Jetson Nano also offers 4GB of LPDDR4 memory, Gigabit Ethernet, 12 MIPI lanes, four USB ports, and can drive up to two simultaneous displays. These features and the Maxwell graphics easily put the Nano's capabilities well ahead of most (or even all?) Arm developer boards hitting for the sub-$100 market. One of the benefits in using the older Tegra X1 design is that the open-source Linux kernel support is in better shape than the just-released SoCs and there is even the open-source Tegra Maxwell graphics support within the Nouveau driver stack.

Unlike the higher-end Jetson boards featuring eMMC storage, the Jetson Nano relies upon a microSD card for storage. The connectivity on the developer kit includes four USB 3.0 Type-A ports, HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.2, 40-pin header, MIPI CSI camera connector, micro-SD slot, M.2 WiFi slot, and Gigabit Ethernet. That's one of the shortcuts on this board is there is no integrated WiFi but does require an external card if you are interested in wireless connectivity.

The Jetson Nano supports CUDA, TensorRT, and the other software components of the higher-end Jetson boards; the same JetPack software runs on the Nano. The "Linux 4 Tegra" on the Jetson Nano targets Ubuntu 18.04 LTS though we have seen other Linux distributions add support for other Jetson boards too.

Overall, the Jetson Nano is quite a compelling product at $99 USD and we've had it in our lab for a few days to deliver some preliminary benchmark results.

NVIDIA rates the Jetson Nano Developer Kit as being able to attain 472 GFLOPs of FP16 compute power out of the Maxwell GPU, the use of four Cortex-A57 cores is much better than most sub-$100 Arm boards, the 4GB of LPDDR4 memory is rated for 25.6 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and the video encode/decode is rated for 4K60 with up to eight 1080p30 HEVC decode streams of 4K30 4x 1080p30 HEVC encodes.

I've only had a few days with the Jetson Nano Developer Kit so far, but the experience to date has been going great and the performance is competitive among the lower-priced Arm SBCs. The performance is far from the Jetson AGX Xavier, understandably, as well as the Jetson TX2. Due to being short on time prior to the embargo lift and running into JetPack problems on the TX1, there aren't all the GPU/compute tests on that older board. But certainly among the likes of the Raspberry Pi and other low-cost boards, the Jetson Nano is competitive.

The Arm SBC benchmark comparison for the Jetson Nano Developer Kit launch day testing included the:

- Jetson TX1 Max-P
- Jetson TX2 Max-Q
- Jetson TX2 Max-P
- Jetson AGX Xavier
- Jetson Nano
- Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
- ASUS Tinker Board
- ODROID XU-4

That was based upon the boards I had the time to freshly re-test given the short turnaround time to launch day as well as for the interesting Arm boards in my possession. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of benchmarks were run while additional tests are forthcoming on Phoronix.

The Jetson Nano GPU performance should be roughly in line with the Jetson TX1 given the Maxwell GPU. Unfortunately TX1 JetPack issues prevented that comparison in time for launch day, but overall the performance of the Jetson Nano with CUDA isn't bad when considering it's sub-$100 and even the Jetson TX2 still retails for $599 USD.

For those wondering about OpenGL performance, the Jetson Nano can score almost 650 at 1080p with GLMark2. Meanwhile most low-cost ARM SBCs don't even ship with working ARM (binary) graphics drivers by default.

For the price, the Jetson Nano TensorRT inference performance is looking very good.

The LCzero chess benchmark scores around 15 nodes per second when just using BLAS on the CPU cores....

But when running this deep learning chess benchmark with CUDA, the Jetson Nano performance jumps to 140 nodes per second.

Here's a look at the CPU performance of the Jetson Nano, which in the case of the TTSIOD 3D Renderer is comparable to the ODROID-XU4.

The Jetson Nano did come out much faster than the ODROID-XU4 for the multi-threaded Rust benchmarks.

For easy analysis, here's a look at the geometric mean from a variety of CPU benchmarks that could run across all of the tested SoCs. The Jetson Nano comes out slightly ahead of the ODROID-XU4, but keep in mind that is only with the Cortex CPU cores and not leveraging the Maxwell GPU.

Besides the CPU performance, the very capable Maxwell GPU on the Jetson Nano is certainly something we aren't used to seeing with these Arm SBCs especially with the NVIDIA Linux driver support while proprietary being much better off than the usual proprietary Arm graphics driver blobs we commonly have to deal with. Beyond that, there is already Tegra Maxwell support within Nouveau should you want open-source driver support albeit then you are losing out on CUDA and other GPU compute abilities.

Also nice with the Jetson Nano Developer Kit is the great connectivity options we also aren't used to seeing on the low-price Arm developer boards... There are four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, both HDMI and DisplayPort that can be driven simultaneously, and powering over USB or a DC power connector.

Overall this is arguably the best sub-$100 Arm developer board we've seen to date depending upon your use-cases. The Jetson Nano will certainly open up NVIDIA Tegra SoCs to appearing in more low-cost DIY projects and other hobbyist use-cases as well as opening up GPU/CUDA acceleration that until now has really not been possible on the low cost boards.

Stay tuned for more benchmarks on the Jetson Nano Developer Kit as I've had more time with the unit while look for this developer board to begin appearing at major Internet retailers beginning tonight at $99 USD.

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