Nvidia has released a new $249 version of its Jetson computer aimed at running artificial intelligence applications. The palm-sized Orin Nano is said to double the speed and efficiency of its predecessor at half the price, and can process up to 70% more tasks, according to Nvidia.
Orin Nano is perfect for hobbyists who want to train their own artificial intelligence applications, or for engineers of robots and other industrial tools to run complex applications without connecting to the cloud.
In a short video on YouTube announcing the product, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stands in his kitchen as he pulls a tray out of his oven to reveal a small, palm-sized computer. Huang goes on to say that the computer can process about “seventy billion” operations per second and draws just 25 watts.
“A long time ago, we created a new type of processor, it was a robot processor,” Huang said. “No one understood what we were building at the time, and we thought that one day these kinds of deep learning would emerge and we would have robots for everything.” Jetpack computers were originally intended to power robots, but today they can run large language models like Meta’s Llama.
Sam Altman’s startup World (formerly Worldcoin), which aims to authenticate a person with iris scans, uses the Jetpack module inside its Orb scanning device. In a blog post back in October, World said, “In its new iteration, Orb is equipped with the most advanced NVIDIA Jetson module with nearly 5x the AI performance of the previous version to enable fast, seamless proof of human authentication.”
Essentially, the Orin Nano is a portable brain that can be connected to other hardware to enable its AI functionality. Cloud hyperscalers like Amazon and Google charge for access to servers and AI models, and those costs can add up. Some applications may require guaranteed uptime and minimal latency, such as warehouse robots. Connecting to a remote cloud hosting provider is incorrect. That said, a computer like the Orin Nano will be able to run very lightweight AI programs—it won’t replace Nvidia’s high-end GPUs that cost tens of thousands of dollars and can train and execute large AI models. .
Still, if you’re a creative person who wants to create some kind of AI-powered robot, the Orin Nano might be for you.
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