NVIDIA Announces Jetson Orin Nano 2: Entry-Level Edge Board Gets New Ampere Silicon

NVIDIA this week gave its Jetson lineup of embedded computing boards an unexpected expansion this week with the announcement of the Jetson Orin Nano 2. The forthcoming entry-level edge AI board is intended to further flesh out NVIDIA’s existing Jetson Orin board, giving customers a more powerful option than the original Nano, but slotting below the all-around more powerful and more expensive Jetson Orin NX.

Altogether, NVIDIA is touting a 2x increase in AI performance for the updated Nano 2, or alternatively the ability to hit a similar performance level at 40% less power. All of which while running the existing Jetson Orin software stack that NVIDIA has built up for the past few years. Under normal circumstances, the Jetson Orin Nano 2 would be an unremarkable product, as NVIDIA already has several different Jetson Orin SKUs. But digging a bit deeper, there is a lot more going on for this board than the official specifications or even NVIDIA’s press release let on, as NVIDIA has designed a new chip to power this SKU. As a result, there is quite a bit going on under the hood that makes the Jetson Orin Nano 2 a notable product release from the company. Diving right in to the specs, here is a high-level look at the specifications for the new Orin Nano 2, and the other Orin products. Compared to its original predecessor, the Nano 2 offers a slight hardware increase across the board. Another two Arm Cortex-A78 CPU cores have been added, bringing it to 8 CPU cores, and the overall (theoretical) tensor throughput of the GPU has been boosted to 78 TOPS of spare INT8 math. Meanwhile the 8GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory has been swapped out for faster LPDDR5X-7500. Based on these specifications alone, it would be reasonable to assume that NVIDIA has just developed another SKU based on their existing Orin silicon, creating a SKU that sits between the Nano and NX. However, looking deeper at the specifications and NVIDIA’s performance claims, things start to break down. How is the 78 TOPS Nano 2 twice the performance of the 67 TOPS first-gen Nano? And how has NVIDIA been able to add support for LPDDR5X memory, which is an adjacent but distinct superset of LPDDR5, to their Orin silicon almost half a decade after it was developed? The disparity arises because the silicon behind the Orin Nano 2 is in fact new silicon altogether from NVIDIA. As outlined by NVIDIA in a separate press briefing for the product launch, the hereto-unnamed chip is still an Orin architecture design combining Arm Cortex-A78 CPU cores with an Ampere architecture GPU, but with new performance enhancements not found in the original Orin silicon.