A few months ago, we covered the New NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX launch. While today’s announcement may sound similar, there is a key difference. Today’s launch is of the developer kit version of the card which adds a reference carrier board and heatsink/ fan at $399 total. This developer kit fixes one of the biggest drawbacks with the lower-cost Jetson Nano platform in addition to adding more performance.
NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX Developer Kit
The NVIDIA Jetson line often comes in small compute modules designed to be integrated into larger platforms such as robots. The developer kits are designed to take those modules and turn them into ready-to-use solutions much like a high-power Raspberry Pi, except with much more performance and special AI accelerators.
The developer kit comes with an open-source reference carrier board that provides four USB 3.1 ports, dual MIPI CSI camera connectors, HDMI, DisplayPort, 1GbE networking, and a 40-pin GPIO connector.
That also provides a bootable microSD card slot, a M.2 2280 (80mm) PCIe x4 NVMe socket, a power supply, and a M.2-based 802.11 WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 module. The Jetson Nano developer kit is very cool, but it does not include WiFi which proves a challenge for an IoT oriented kit. At $399, there is more room to add this type of feature.
The Jetson Xavier NX is a 384 CUDA core and 48 Tensor Core design based on “Volta” generation GPU cores. There is also a 6-core 64-bit Carmel ARMv8.2 CPU onboard and 8GB of LPDDR4X memory.
Here is the quick comparison of the current Jetson family. One area that is a bit of a drawback here is that this unit only includes 8GB of eMMC. Even the $99 Jetson Nano includes twice the eMMC. That may push one to utilize the NVMe or microSD card slot more heavily.
Of course, Volta is effectively now two generations old technology with Turing and Ampere offering more recent tensor cores. Still, for the embedded space, this is a big-time GPU that shares architecture with the rest of NVIDIA’s line which makes it important.
Final Words
Pricing is $399 and there are currently no educational discounts on the Jetson Xavier NX developer kit. For those buying a handful of Jetson Xavier NX modules, it makes more sense to get the developer kit than the bare modules at this price. NVIDIA says you can order the new dev kits today.
The specs seem to be outdated , considering Nvidia is has stopped selling the Xavier AGX with 16GB of RAM and has replaced it with 32 GB of RAM for the same price since January. https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-agx-xavier-developer-kit
After experiencing many issues thanks to a non-standard ARM complex on their Jetson Nano, I don’t think I’ll be considering using any more of their SBCs. There are simply too many other competing projects that are more open-source and/or deliver vastly better compatibility.
I don’t know, in my experience with hardcore, industrial IoT, specifically with machine vision for say, fruit packing, WiFi would at least want a hardware/jumper off switch or, as in this case, make it “optional.” Far less chance of remote sabotage.