NVIDIA Unveils Jetson Orin Nano Super, A $249 Palm-Sized AI Robotics Supercomputer

NVIDIA is all about artificial intelligence (AI) these days, and with good reason—the AI market is booming. However, it's not a segment that's solely applicable to customers within the data center or other high-priced categories. Proving otherwise, NVIDIA has introduced the Jetson Orion Nano Super Developer Kit, a pint-sized generative AI powerhouse that's as compact as it is affordable.

Priced at just $249, it's half the cost as its predecessor. That doesn't mean NVIDIA gimped its performance to get there, either. Just the opposite, NVIDIA says the Jetson Orion Nano delivers up to a 1.7x  performance uplift in generative AI inference, a huge leap in performance to 67 Sparse TOPS (up from 40 TOPS) and 33 Dense TOPS, and a big bump in memory bandwidth to 102GB/s (up from 68GB/s).

"Whether creating LLM chatbots based on retrieval-augmented generation, building a visual AI agent, or deploying AI-based robots, the Jetson Orin Nano Super is an ideal solution to fetch," NVIDIA says.

Indeed, the dev kit's pricing and compact form factor, along with the performance upgrades, makes it suitable for a wider audience. It will be interesting to see what AI developers, hobbyists, and students—three categories NVIDIA specifically mentions—are able to do with the newest Jetson Orin Nano.

"Jetson Orin Nano Super is suited for those interested in developing skills in generative AI, robotics, or computer vision. As the AI world is moving from task-specific models into foundation models, it also provides an accessible platform to transform ideas into reality," NVIDIA adds.

The kit comprises an 8GB system-on-module (SoM) and a reference carrier board. As for the SoM, it's based on Ampere with 1,024 CUDA cores, 32 Tensor cores, and a 6-core Arm Cortex-A78AE processor clocked at 1.7GHz, which is a 200MHz bump in clock speed compared to the previous version. It also features 8GB of 128-bit LPDDR5 RAM and supports M.2 storage.

Along with releasing new hardware, NVIDIA says newly available software updates will provide a generative AI performance boost to those who already own a Jetson Orin Nano. It's clear to what extent, but at least they're not being left out in the lurch.

NVIDIA's Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit is available now.