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

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.