NVIDIA Corp. this week announced that the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16 GB module is now available for purchase worldwide. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said it is “building on the momentum from last year’s expansion of NVIDIA Jetson edge AI devices.”
“The Jetson Orin NX 16 GB module is unmatched in performance and efficiency for small form factor, low-power robots, and autonomous machines,” wrote Jason Black, a senior manager of marketing and communications for autonomous machines at NVIDIA, in a blog post.
“This makes it ideal for use in products like drones and handheld devices,” he said. “The module can easily be used for advanced applications such as manufacturing, logistics, retail, agriculture, healthcare, and life sciences—all in a truly compact, power-efficient package.”
NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16 GB specifications
The new Jetson module is NVIDIA's smallest yet and is designed to deliver up to 100 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of AI performance with power configurable between 10 W and 25 W. It provides developers triple the performance of the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier and five times the performance of the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX, said the company.
The system on module (SoM) supports multiple AI application pipelines with the NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPU (graphics processing unit), next-generation deep learning and vision accelerators, high-speed I/O, and fast memory bandwidth, explained NVIDIA. Developers will be able to develop systems for their largest and most complex AI models in natural language understanding, 3D perception, and multi-sensor fusion, it claimed.
To demonstrate the performance improvement, NVIDIA ran some computer vision benchmarks using the NVIDIA JetPack 5.1. Testing included some dense INT8 and FP16 pretrained models from NGC.
The same models were also run for comparison on Jetson Xavier NX. The company ran the following benchmarks:
- NVIDIA PeopleNet v2.5 for the highest accuracy in people detection
- NVIDIA ActionRecognitionNet for 2D and 3D models
- NVIDIA LPRNet for license plate recognition
- NVIDIA DashCamNet for object detection and labeling
- NVIDIA BodyPoseNet for multiperson human pose estimation
“Taking the geomean of these benchmarks, Jetson Orin NX shows a 2.1x performance increase compared to Jetson Xavier NX,” said Black. “With future software optimizations, this is expected to approach 3.1x for dense benchmarks. Other Jetson devices have increased performance by 1.5x since their first supporting software release, similar is anticipated for the Jetson Orin NX 16 GB.”
Jetson Orin NX also supports inference sparsity, which can enable even greater performance, said NVIDIA. Developers can take advantage of the fine-grained structured sparsity in deep learning networks to increase the throughput for Tensor Core operations, it noted.
All Jetson Orin modules run the standard NVIDIA AI software stack.
Companies incorporate Jetson into robots
Petach Tikva, Israel-based Cogniteam said in September 2022 that it has used NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin in its Nimbus Operating System to accelerate robotics development.
“The NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin is a huge leap for manufacturers and developers who want greater AI capabilities on their edge robots,” stated Dr. Yehuda Elmaliah, co-founder and CEO of Cogniteam, at the time. “We were pleased to see that the development of this new module integrates seamlessly with the Nimbus Operating System, enabling deployed robots to handle greater AI computational abilities.”
More recently, Syslogic yesterday introduced embedded systems based on the new SoM, including the Rugged Computer RPC RS A4NX and two versions of the RPG RML A4NX. The ruggedized systems can perform inference and vision tasks in mobile robots, construction machinery, and agricultural and special-purpose vehicles, said the Swiss company.
In addition, 3D camera manufacturer Orbbec today announced that it had launched its latest product, the Femto Mega, at CES 2023. The new camera integrates NVIDIA Jetson for software-defined depth vision and is aimed at robotics developers.
“Femto Mega is aimed at extending the capabilities of 2D and 3D sensing from the physical world to digital twins in the virtual world,” said Amit Banerjee, head of platform and partnerships at Troy, Mich.-based Orbbec. “We're excited about our collaboration with NVIDIA to bring the best combination of 3D sensing and AI-accelerated computing for developers deploying intelligent robots and automation applications.”
NVIDIA Jetpack, AGX Orin Developer Kit now available
NVIDIA JetPack 5.1, also released this week, brings support for the Orin NX 16 GB and the latest CUDA-X stack on Jetson Orin.
In addition, the Jetson partner ecosystem supports a broad range of carrier boards and peripherals for the Jetson Orin NX 16 GB module. Examples include sensors; cameras; and Wi-Fi, 4G, and 5G connectivity modules, said NVIDIA.
The company said options include:
- Partner-supported hardware systems (carrier boards and full systems)
- Partner-supported camera modules
The NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit is also available now and supports software emulation for the entire family of Jetson Orin modules, including the Jetson Orin NX 16 GB module.
NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX documentation is available at the Jetson download center. The company also offers more information and support at the NVIDIA Embedded Developer page and the Jetson forums.
The Jetson Orin NX 16 GB is available now for $599 (for more than 1,000 units).
“Supported by an ecosystem of services and products, your road to market has never been faster,” wrote Black.
Article topics
Email Sign Up
Related Processors News
Related Companies
