Nvidia's new $249 AI development board promises 67 TOPS at half the price of the previous 40 TOPS model

Nvidia's introducing a new development board that offers 70 percent more performance at half the price of its last-gen Jetson Orin Nano kit. Dubbed the Jetson Orin Nano Super, this new single-board computer promises 67 TOPS (total operations per second) for just $249 versus the 40 TOPs for $499 the prior board delivered.

However, Nvidia says that users of its current-gen boards, including the Orin Nano (non-super) will also get performance boosts of up to 70 percent when they install a new software update. For example, the Orin NX 16GB will jump from 100 to 157 TOPS and the Orin NX 8GB will go from 70 to 117 TOPS.

The Jetson Orin Nano Super features a six-core Arm Coretex-A78AE CPU that runs at 1.7 GHz and comes with 8GB of DRAM on board. Its 1,020 MHz GPU has 1,024 CUDA cores and 32 Tensor cores, allowing it to deliver a maximum of 67 TOPS (spares) or 33 TOPS (dense).

The system can be powered over either USB-C or a proprietary barrel connector and, for maximum performance, it must be run at 25 watts. It has four USB 3.2 Type-A ports that run at 10 Gbps, along with two MIPI CSI Camera connectors (could work with a Raspberry Pi camera) and both 2280 and 2230 M.2 connectors for SSDs on the bottom.

It also has a 40-PIN GPIO that's compatible with Raspberry Pi outputs. In theory, you could use Raspberry Pi hats with the Nano.

You can boot off of an SSD, but you can also use a microSD card. The Nano is supposed to run L4T, a version of Linux that's made specifically to run on Nvidia's hardware.

According to Nvidia, the new Jetson Orin Nano Super sees a 1.37x to 1.63x boost in Large Language Model (LLM) performance, a 1.36 to 2.04x boost in vision models, and a 1.43 to 1.69x jump in vision transformers.

The new developer kits should be available within a week or so at all the places you would normally buy an Nvidia kit, including Amazon, DigiKey, Arrow.com and Seeed Studio.