NVIDIA Unveils $59 USD Raspberry Pi Competitor With Jetson Nano 2GB

Last year NVIDIA announced the Jetson Nano at $99 USD as their lowest-priced ARM SBC board to date focused on inference, robotics, and other GPU-accelerated tasks in a small, low-power form factor. The Jetson Nano at $99 USD is already significantly cheaper than the other numerous Jetson boards over the past several years while now today they are introducing a $59 board.

The Jetson Nano 2GB is priced at $59 USD and is similar to the $99 board but with just 2GB of system memory rather than 4GB. This pricing puts it in much more direct competition to the higher-end Raspberry Pi models while having the more powerful Tegra GPU and NVIDIA's extensive GPU-optimized software solutions.

The Jetson Nano 2GB will be available later this month. NVIDIA did send over a review unit but it's not arriving until later today, thus our review and benchmarks of it won't be coming until the days/weeks ahead.

The Jetson Nano 2GB is certainly an interesting entrant for those wanting a more affordable ARM SBC with capable GPU for engaging in various compute tasks. $59 gets you the Jetson Nano with four Cortex-A57 cores at 1.43GHz, 2GB of LPDDR4 memory, microSD storage, 128-core Maxwell GPU with NVENC/NVDEC and CUDA capabilities, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI output, and three USB 3.0 ports. The PCB remains sized at 100 x 80 x 29 mm.

Coming in at $55 USD on the Raspberry Pi side is the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 4GB of RAM, dual micro HDMI ports, two USB 3.0 + two USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC has four Cortex-A72 cores at 1.5GHz with VideoCore VI graphics. The Arm cores on the Raspberry Pi 4 should perform better but the Jetson Nano 2GB has the much more capable GPU and software stack that is well supported already through the industry. The forthcoming benchmarks will be quite interesting.

The Jetson Nano 2GB with NVIDIA's Linux 4 Tegra is using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS by default. When I asked about plans for moving L4T to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, they will likely be looking at that in 2021.

The Jetson Nano 2GB should be available for pre-order from NVIDIA.com. Stay tuned for testing.