By Gina Roos, editor-in-chief
Makers and technology enthusiasts as well as developers can buy a $99 AI computer from NVIDIA, packing 472 GFLOPS of compute performance for running AI workloads while consuming as little as 5 W. Unveiled this week at the GPU Technology Conference , the Jetson Nano AI computer is available in two versions: the $99 dev kit for developers, makers, and enthusiasts and the $129 production-ready module to create mass-market edge systems.
It may be small, but the CUDA-X AI computer delivers a bunch of features. The Jetson Nano supports high-resolution sensors and many of the popular AI frameworks. It can process many sensors in parallel and can run multiple modern neural networks on each sensor stream, said NVIDIA. The kit comes with support for full-desktop Linux, compatibility with many popular peripherals and accessories, and ready-to-use projects and tutorials.
“The power of AI is largely out of reach for the maker community and in education because typical technologies do not pack enough computing power and lack an AI software platform,” said NVIDIA. “At $99, the Jetson Nano Developer Kit brings the power of modern AI to a low-cost platform, enabling a new wave of innovation from makers, inventors, developers, and students. They can build AI projects that weren’t previously possible and take existing projects to the next level — mobile robots and drones, digital assistants, automated appliances, and more.”
Designed to help reduce development time and speed up time to market, the Jetson Nano module comes complete with power management, clocking, memory, and fully accessible inputs/outputs. Companies can update performance and capabilities even after the system has been deployed because the AI workloads are software-defined.
Key features of the Jetson Nano include:
- GPU: 128-core NVIDIA Maxwell architecture-based GPU
- CPU: Quad-core Arm A57
- Video: 4K @ 30 fps (H.264/H.265)/4K @ 60 fps (H.264/H.265) encode and decode
- Camera: MIPI CSI-2 DPHY lanes, 12× (Module) and 1× (Developer Kit)
- Memory: 4-GB 64-bit LPDDR4; 25.6 gigabytes/second
- Connectivity: Gigabit Ethernet
- OS Support: Linux for Tegra
- Module Size: 70 × 45 mm
- Developer Kit Size: 100 × 80 mm
In addition, Jetson-powered devices, including the Jetson Nanos, are qualified to run Amazon Web Services IoT Greengrass. Other benefits include NVIDIA’s JetPack SDK complete AI software stack and reference platforms, including NVIDIA JetBot, a small mobile robot that is open-sourced on GitHub . Users can get technical answers at the Jetson developer forum .
Where to buy: The NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit is available now for $99. The Jetson Nano module is priced at $129 in quantities of 1,000+ and will begin shipping in June. Both will be sold through NVIDIA’s main global distributors . Developer kits can also be purchased from maker channels Seeed Studio and SparkFun .
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