from the I'm-going-to-name-one-George...and-hug-it-and-pet-it-and-squeeze-it dept.
Nvidia Announces Jetson Nano Dev Kit & Board: X1 for $99
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 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.
$99 without storage.
Related: Nvidia Reveals Jetson Xavier SoC for Robots
Related Stories
NVIDIA wants to power intelligent robots with Jetson Xavier
NVIDIA is hoping to play a bigger role in the future of robotics with its Isaac platform, powered by the new Jetson Xavier system-on-a-chip. If that name sounds familiar, it's because it's relying on the same the processor from the Xavier Drive self-driving SOC. The Xavier is over twenty times faster than the existing Jetson TX2 platform, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed at Computex today. While that last SoC was useful for products like delivery robots and drones, Huang is calling the Xavier the "world's first computer for intelligent robots."
Under the hood, Jetson Xavier has six different processors: An octa-core Arm CPU; a Volta Tensor Core GPU; two NVDLA deep learning chips, as well as vision, video and image processors. Xavier is capable of 30 trillion operations per second, and it sports over 9 billion transistors. Just like with self-driving cars, all of that horsepower will help with things like sensor processing and computer vision. After all, a robot won't be truly intelligent until it can easily maneuver through any environment and naturally interact with humans and other machines.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that new GeForce GPUs will not launch until "a long time from now".
Also at The Verge.
Nvidia has announced its next chip for self-driving cars years in advance:
First outlined as part of NVIDIA's DRIVE roadmap at GTC 2018, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang took the stage at GTC China this morning to properly introduce the chip that will be powering the next generation of the DRIVE platform. Officially dubbed the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin, the new chip will eventually succeed NVIDIA's currently shipping Xavier SoC, which has been available for about the last year now. In fact, as has been the case with previous NVIDIA DRIVE unveils, NVIDIA is announcing the chip well in advance: the company isn't expecting the chip to be fully ready for automakers until 2022.
What lies beneath Orin then is a lot of hardware, with NVIDIA going into some high-level details on certain parts, but skimming over others. Overall, Orin is a 17 billion transistor chip, almost double the transistor count of Xavier and continuing the trend of very large, very powerful automotive SoCs. NVIDIA is not disclosing the manufacturing process being used at this time, but given their timeframe, some sort of 7nm or 5nm process (or derivative) is pretty much a given. And NVIDIA will definitely need a smaller manufacturing process – to put things in comparison, the company's top-end Turing GPU, TU102, takes up 754mm2 for 18.6B transistors, so Orin will pack in almost as many transistors as one of NVIDIA's best GPUs today.
[...] All told, NVIDIA expects Orin to deliver 7x the 30 INT8 TOPS performance of Xavier, with the combination of the GPU and DLA pushing 200 TOPS. It goes without saying that NVIDIA is still heavily invested in neural networks as the solution to self-driving systems, so they are similarly heavily investing in hardware to execute those neural nets.
[...] Finally, while NVIDIA hasn't disclosed any official figures for power consumption, it's clear that overall power usage is going up relative to Xavier. While Orin is expected to be 7x faster than Xavier, NVIDIA is only claiming it's 3x as power efficient. Assuming NVIDIA is basing all of this on INT8 TOPS as they usually do, then the 1 TOPS/Watt Xavier would be replaced by the 3 TOPS/Watt Orin, putting the 200 TOPS chip at around 65-70 Watts. Which is admittedly still fairly low for a single chip at a company that sells 400 Watt GPUs, but it could add up if NVIDIA builds another multi-processor board like the DRIVE Pegasus.
The design will include 12 ARM "Hercules" (Cortex-A78) cores rather than Nvidia-designed custom ARM cores.
Also at Wccftech.
Related: Nvidia Demos a Car Computer Trained with "Deep Learning"
Nvidia Announces Jetson Nano Single-Board Computer
Nvidia Supercomputer to Crunch Autonomous Vehicles Data
Nvidia has announced a cheaper version of its $99 Jetson Nano developer kit. The Jetson Nano pairs a quad-core Cortex-A57 ARM CPU with 128 Maxwell GPU cores. The new model has 2 GiB of RAM instead of 4 GiB, drops one of the four USB ports (which may be USB 2.0 instead of 3.0), and drops DisplayPort output.
Elsewhere at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference 2020:
NVIDIA Online GTC 2020 Kicks Off Today But No Open-Source Linux Announcement Expected
Quadro No More? NVIDIA Announces Ampere-based RTX A6000 & A40 Video Cards For Pro Visualization
NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs Set to Ship In 2021, Roadmaps BlueField-3&4 By 2023
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday March 19 2019, @06:17AM (2 children)
"Nvidia (sic) new focus on robotics, AI and autonomous machine applications".
Consider that the difference between a video game robot and an industrial robot is that the industrial bot _verifies_ that commands issued were actually executed _correctly_.
Such closed feedback loops have been a solved problem since the fifties or so.
As for AI?
Nigga, please.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @01:16PM
Where's the fun in that?
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday March 19 2019, @06:08PM
Define correctly.
Homeowner: I am asking to verify that you did correctly paint the porch with white paint and applied two coats.
Painter: Yes sir!
Homeowner: Here is your $50.
Painter: Thanks. And BTW, it wasn't a porch, it was a ferari.
Verification complete.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 2) by Revek on Tuesday March 19 2019, @01:31PM (1 child)
Just ordered one or should I say pre ordered one. I'll bite with specs like 4gb of ram and USB 3.0 with Pi compatible addons. Sounds like a win win as long as the support for it really materializes.
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(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @02:18PM
Knowing Nvidia, I expect this board will be unusable due to a lack of working drivers and source code.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by urza9814 on Tuesday March 19 2019, @04:33PM (1 child)
Yeah, when NVidia shows that they can actually provide proper support for Linux, I might consider buying an SBC from them. Specs might look nice, but they aren't gonna be so great if you have to run Windows on the thing to get proper compatibility...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 19 2019, @06:08PM
Lack of Linux support is a complete deal killer.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19 2019, @06:07PM
what kind of shameless skank buys nvidia? especially for a dev board? oh, i see a dirty legged whore down below. shame, shame...