Nvidia Corp. today launched a new compact generative artificial intelligence developer kit with the Jetson Orin Nano Super, which fits into the palm of a hand and provides commercial AI developers, hobbyists and students access to powerful robotics and edge AI compute at low cost.

Nvidia Jetson Orin is a family of compact energy-efficient AI supercomputers that can power autonomous robots, machines and other networked edge systems. Using Nvidia Ampere graphics processing unit architecture, deep learning and vision AI accelerators, fast memory and multimodal sensor support they support multiple industry use cases for robotics, detectors and network operations.

The Jetson Orin Nano Super delivers a 1.7-times leap in generative AI inference performance in model deployment over the previous generation of Orin Nano, Nvidia said, representing a 70% performance increase and a 50% increase in memory bandwidth. 

Nvidia said in the announcement that the solution is ideal for creating large language model chatbots based on retrieval-augmented generation, building a visual AI agent or deploying AI-based robots.

The developer kit consists of a Jetson Orin Nano 8 gigabyte system-on-module and a reference carrier board. That provides a platform for prototyping hardware applications and reference architecture for edge AI applications.

The price of the developer kit is now $249, down from $499. This should put it in the hands of more developers, students and engineers, making it more available in the market.    

“It’s like we’ve taken Orin Nano and added a cape to make it a superhero,” said Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of embedded and edge computing at Nvidia, referring to the “Super” part of Orin Nano Super. “Superhero comes from two things: one, 70% performance improvement and, two, half the price. So, the overall improvement is three-and-a-half times better than before.”

The company also announced software updates for users of current Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kits that will boost performance for developers. The software updates available for the Super will boost inference for earlier versions of the Orin Nano. The software updates accelerate generative AI performance for Jetson Orin NX and Orin Nano series systems by around 1.7x, Nvidia said.

According to Nvidia, the Orin Nano Super is capable of running almost any popular generative AI model and transformer-based computer vision model from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Google LLC, Hugging Face, Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp., OpenAI and more. That makes the developer kit the perfect platform to build and design robotics and internet of things applications to use AI models in the field for autonomous applications such as autonomous vehicles or robots.

 Image: Nvidia