NVIDIA Launches Jetson Nano AI Computer

At the GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA announced the Jetson Nano, an AI computer that makes it possible to create millions of intelligent systems, NVIDIA reports.

The small CUDA-X AI computer delivers 472 GFLOPS of compute performance for running modern AI workloads and is power-efficient, consuming as little as 5 watts, according to NVIDIA.

Unveiled at the GPU Technology Conference by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, Jetson Nano comes in two versions—the $99 devkit for developers, makers and enthusiasts and the $129 production-ready module for companies looking to create mass-market edge systems.

Jetson Nano supports high-resolution sensors, can process many sensors in parallel and can run multiple modern neural networks on each sensor stream. It also supports many popular AI frameworks, enabling developers to integrate their preferred models and frameworks into the product.

Jetson Nano joins the Jetson family lineup, which also includes the Jetson AGX Xavier for fully autonomous machines and Jetson TX2 for AI at the edge. Ideal for enterprises, startups and researchers, the Jetson platform now extends its reach with Jetson Nano to 30 million makers, developers, inventors and students globally.

“Jetson Nano makes AI more accessible to everyone — and is supported by the same underlying architecture and software that powers our nation’s supercomputers,” says Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of Autonomous Machines at NVIDIA. “Bringing AI to the maker movement opens up a whole new world of innovation, inspiring people to create the next big thing.”

Jetson Nano Developer Kit

At $99, the Jetson Nano Developer Kit can enable innovation from makers, inventors, developers and students. They can build AI projects and take existing projects to the next level — mobile robots and drones, digital assistants, automated appliances and more.

The kit comes with out-of-the-box support for full desktop Linux, compatibility with many popular peripherals and accessories, and ready-to-use projects and tutorials that help makers get started with AI fast. NVIDIA also manages the Jetson developer forum, where people can get answers to technical questions.

Jetson Nano Module

The Jetson Nano module enhances embedded applications, including network video recorders, home robots and intelligent gateways with full analytics capabilities. It is designed to reduce overall development time by reducing the time spent in hardware design, test and verification of a complex AI system.

The design features power management, clocking, memory and fully accessible input/outputs. Because the AI workloads are entirely software defined, companies can update performance and capabilities even after the system has been deployed.

To help customers easily move AI and machine learning workloads to the edge, NVIDIA worked with Amazon Web Services to qualify AWS Internet of Things Greengrass to run optimally with Jetson-powered devices such as Jetson Nano.

One Software Stack 

NVIDIA CUDA-X is a collection of over 40 acceleration libraries that enable modern computing applications to benefit from NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated computing platform. JetPack SDK is built on CUDA-X and is a complete AI software stack with accelerated libraries for deep learning, computer vision, computer graphics and multimedia processing that supports the entire Jetson family.

The JetPack includes the latest versions of CUDA, cuDNN, TensorRT and a full desktop Linux OS. Jetson is compatible with the NVIDIA AI platform.

Reference Platforms to Prototype

NVIDIA has also created a reference platform to jumpstart the building of AI applications by minimizing the time spent on initial hardware assembly. NVIDIA JetBot is a small mobile robot that can be built with off-the-shelf components and open sourced on GitHub.

Availability

The NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit is available now for $99. The Jetson Nano module is $129 (in quantities of 1,000 or more) 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.

More Info

NVIDIA

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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