[Stefan Mileschin]

Today at GTC 2019 Nvidia launched a new member of the Jetson family: The new Jetson Nano. The Jetson family of products represents Nvidia new focus on robotics, AI and autonomous machine applications. A few months back we had the pleasure to have a high level review of the Jetson AGX as well as the Xavier chip that powers it.

The biggest concern of the AGX dev kit was its pricing – with retail costs of $2500 ($1299 as part of Nvidia’s developer programme), it’s massively out of range of most hobbyist users such as our readers.

The new Jetson Nano addresses the cost issue in a quite dramatic way. Here Nvidia promises to deliver a similar level of functionality than its more expensive Jetson products, at a much lower price point, and of course at a lower performance point.

The Jetson Nano is a full blown single-board-computer in the form of a module. The module form-factor and connector is SO-DIMM and is similar to past Nvidia modules by the company. The goal of the form-factor is to have the most compact form-factor possible, as it is envisioned to be used in a wide variety of applications where a possible customer will design their own connector boards best fit for their design needs.

At the heart of the Nano module we find Nvidia’s “Erista” chip which also powered the Tegra X1 in the Nvidia Shield as well as the Nintendo Switch. The variant used in the Nano is a cut-down version though, as the 4 A57 cores only clock up to 1.43GHz and the GPU only has half the cores (128 versus 256 in the full X1) active. The module comes with 4GB of LPDDR4 and a 16GB eMMC module. The Jetson Nano module will be available to interested parties for $129.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14101...es-jetson-nano