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

The LCzero chess benchmark scores around 15 nodes per second when just using BLAS on the CPU cores....

But when running this deep learning chess benchmark with CUDA, the Jetson Nano performance jumps to 140 nodes per second.

Here's a look at the CPU performance of the Jetson Nano, which in the case of the TTSIOD 3D Renderer is comparable to the ODROID-XU4.

The Jetson Nano did come out much faster than the ODROID-XU4 for the multi-threaded Rust benchmarks.

For easy analysis, here's a look at the geometric mean from a variety of CPU benchmarks that could run across all of the tested SoCs. The Jetson Nano comes out slightly ahead of the ODROID-XU4, but keep in mind that is only with the Cortex CPU cores and not leveraging the Maxwell GPU.

Besides the CPU performance, the very capable Maxwell GPU on the Jetson Nano is certainly something we aren't used to seeing with these Arm SBCs especially with the NVIDIA Linux driver support while proprietary being much better off than the usual proprietary Arm graphics driver blobs we commonly have to deal with. Beyond that, there is already Tegra Maxwell support within Nouveau should you want open-source driver support albeit then you are losing out on CUDA and other GPU compute abilities.

Also nice with the Jetson Nano Developer Kit is the great connectivity options we also aren't used to seeing on the low-price Arm developer boards... There are four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, both HDMI and DisplayPort that can be driven simultaneously, and powering over USB or a DC power connector.

Overall this is arguably the best sub-$100 Arm developer board we've seen to date depending upon your use-cases. The Jetson Nano will certainly open up NVIDIA Tegra SoCs to appearing in more low-cost DIY projects and other hobbyist use-cases as well as opening up GPU/CUDA acceleration that until now has really not been possible on the low cost boards.

Stay tuned for more benchmarks on the Jetson Nano Developer Kit as I've had more time with the unit while look for this developer board to begin appearing at major Internet retailers beginning tonight at $99 USD.