AAEON Wants to Drive Your Next Edge AI Project with Its UP NV8600-Nano AI Developer Kit

AAEON has announced a new entry in its UP range, designed for those looking to experiment with accelerated on-device edge artificial intelligence (edge AI): the UP NV8600-Nano AI Developer Kit, powered by NVIDIA's Jetson Orin Nano computer-on-module (COM).

"NV8600-Nano AI Developer Kit [is] industrial certified and mass-production ready for project use," AAEON claims of the bundle, which pairs NVIDIA's Jetson Orin Nano computer-on-module with AAEON's own design of carrier board, designed to break out more features than NVIDIA's own carrier board.

The Jetson Orin Nano 8GB at the center of the kit, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos, gives the kit a six-core Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU running at up to 1.5GHz linked to an Orin graphics processor with 1,024 CUDA cores and 32 Tensor cores — designed, in this case, for accelerating on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads with up to 67 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at INT8 precision when running in the power-hungry new Super Mode.

To this, AAEON has added a few nice extras: a 256GB Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) drive pre-loaded with NVIDIA's Ubuntu Linux-based Jetpack software and a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 2 for experimenting with computer vision projects. It's the carrier board that really brings the bundle together, though: a custom design that breaks out a wealth of features including HDMI connectivity, two MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) inputs, four gigabit Ethernet ports with optional Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) support, six USB 3.2 Gen. 2 Type-A ports, one RS232/422/485 serial port and another via pin header, an M.2 2230-footprint E-key slot, an M.2 2242/3042/3052 B-key slot for a cellular modem with integrated SIM slot, and an M.2 2280 M-key slot filled by the NVMe drive, plus a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, CAN bus connector, and a micro-USB port for flashing a new firmware image, and a UART bus for debugging, and if that weren't enough there's a SATA port for additional storage.

In short, it's difficult to think of something missing from AAEON's carrier board — and while that makes it bulkier than NVIDIA's own design, it provides plenty of increased flexibility to make up for its increased footprint. The company has also considered thermals, particularly in the face of the increased power draw of the new Super Mode, and bundles a heatsink and fan assembly to keep the module cool during heavy computation; a 60W power supply is also provided, with a two-pin terminal block accepting 12-24VDC if you'd prefer to power the system another way.

The UP NV8600-Nano AI Developer Kit is available on the AAEON UP store now, priced at $649; that's a considerable hike over NVIDIA's own Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit, with its more compact carrier board, no camera, and no NVMe drive, which is priced at $249 — though, at the time of writing, no stock was available from any of the company's official resellers.