NVIDIA Unveils the Jetson Orin Nano Super, Delivers a 1.7× Gen AI Speed Boost for All

NVIDIA has announced a major update to its Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit, unveiling a "Super" upgrade that boosts performance for generative AI applications by around 70 percent — and the same gains are being made available to owners of original Jetson Orin Nano and Orin NX modules too, free of charge.

"This is a brand-new Jetson Nano Super," NVIDIA founder, president, and chief executive officer Jensen Huang explains in an introductory video. "Almost 70 trillion operations per second. 25 watts. And $249. It even runs large language models, and I can't wait for you to try it. Go get it. Enjoy robotics."

The Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit isn't actually new hardware, which remains unchanged since our March 2023 launch review, but an unleashing of hidden performance. The kit still bundles the same Jetson Orin Nano 8GB system-on-module as before, with the same six-core Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU and Ampere 1,024-CUDA 32 Tensor Core GPU backed by the same 8GB of LPDDR5 memory. What has changed is in how far NVIDIA is willing to push that hardware — and the answer is "near twice as far," at least for the GPU.

The new "Super Mode" unlocks a new performance level above the 15W target power draw of the previous release, now targeting a heftier 25W — a figure that, as always, will be noticeably higher measured at the wall. The extra power allows NVIDIA to run the GPU at almost twice the clock speed, 1,050MHz from the previous 625MHz limit. The CPU cores are also boosted, although less so: the 1.5GHz upper limit has now been raised to 1.7GHz, so long as you're running in Super Mode.

That the hardware is unchanged is good news for those who have already invested in the Jetson ecosystem: NVIDIA has confirmed that the software update adding the new Super Mode will be made available to all existing Jetson Orin Nano 4GB and 8GB, and Jetson Orin NX 8GB and 16GB, systems-on-modules — including the ones bundled with earlier Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kits. Once installed, the free update will add the Super Mode alongside existing power targets — unlocking a 25W target for all Orin Nano modules and a 40W target for all Orin NX modules.

In terms of what that means, it's a near-doubling in performance — something NVIDIA is positioning as ideal for putting a Jetson Orin module to work for on-device generative artificial intelligence (gen AI). The Orin Nano 4GB now hits 32 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of sparse INT8 and 17 TOPS of dense INT8 compute, while the more powerful Orin Nano 8GB — the version bundled into the Developer Kit — hits 67 TOPS sparse and 33 TOPS dense.

The Orin NX 8GB module, meanwhile, offers 117 TOPS sparse and 58 TOPS dense compute in the new Super Mode, with the Orin NX 16GB topping out at 157 TOPS sparse and 78 TOPS dense — of which 77 TOPS sparse and 38 TOPS dense comes from the compute and the rest from also-boosted NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) coprocessors missing in the Orin Nano range.

If anyone is disappointed to find NVIDIA leaving the hardware alone, approaching two years after the Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit launched, the company's final announcement should raise a smile: the kit is having its price slashed, effective immediately, from its $499 launch price to just $249.

More information can be found on the NVIDIA website, while the lower-cost developer bundle is now available to order in-channel.