NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit
NVIDIA has released a few different IoT boards. The NVIDIA Jetson Nano is the latest board they’ve released. The board is available as a Developer Kit that contains all the inputs and connections necessary to use it for prototyping IoT solutions.
Here are some of the key compute features of the NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit:
- CPU – Quad-core ARM Cortex-A57 MPCore processor
- GPU – NVIDIA Maxwell w/ 128 NVIDIA CUDA cores
- Memory – 4 GB 64-bit LPDDR4
- Display – HDMI and DisplayPort output
- USB – 4x USB 3 ports
- I/O – I2C, SPI, UART, and Raspberry Pi compatible GPIO header
The NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit provides a full compute solution (with integrated GPU) that can be used to prototype IoT solutions. The NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit is extensible through a really great selection of ports and interfaces, in addition to the CPU / GPU compute hardware fo the Jetson Nano compute module.
Raspberry Pi 4 vs NVIDIA Jetson Nano Specs Compared
As you can see from the above list of initial specs of both board, there certainly are some simularities. Let’s take a look at comparing the specifications of both the Raspberry Pi 4 and NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit.
Here are the specifications of both boards side-by-side:
| Raspberry Pi 4 | NVIDIA Jetson Nano | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 64-bit @ 1.5 Ghz | Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A57 64-bit @ 1.42 Ghz |
| GPU | Broadcom VideoCore VI (32-bit) | NVIDIA Maxwell w/ 128 CUDA cores @ 921 Mhz |
| Memory | 4 GB LPDDR4** | 4 GB LPDDR4 |
| Networking | Gigabit Ethernet / Wifi 802.11ac | Gigabit Ethernet / M.2 Key E (for Wifi support) |
| Display | 2x micro-HDMI (up to 4Kp60) | HDMI 2.0 and eDP 1.4 |
| USB | 2x USB 3.0, 2x USB 2.0 | 4x USB 3.0, USB 2.0 Micro-B |
| Other | 40-pin GPIO | 40-pin GPIO |
| Video Encode | H264(1080p30) | H.264/H.265 (4Kp30) |
| Video Decode | H.265(4Kp60), H.264(1080p60) | H.264/H.265 (4Kp60, 2x 4Kp30) |
| Camera | MIPI CSI port | MIPI CSI port |
| Storage | Micro-SD | Micro-SD |
| Price | $55 USD | $99 USD |
** The Raspberry Pi 4 comes in multiple options including 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB or 8GB RAM.
As you can see, the primary features of the Raspberry Pi 4 and the NVIDIA Jetson Nano are extremely similar. Keep in mind there are a few differences not listed, as this is not a full list of each of the boards features. However, most of the features are the same or similar, with the exception of one.
Both are full single board computers built with ARM processors and 4 GB of RAM, plus a bunch of connectivity for peripherals. The Raspberry Pi 4 is also available in an option with 8GB of memory. The biggest difference in computes and graphics capabilities between these two boards are with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano including a higher performant, more capable GPU (graphics processor), while the Raspberry Pi 4 has a low power integrated multimedia GPU. Although, the price of the NVIDIA Jetson Nano is higher, so there is certainly a price to pay for access to the higher performance Maxwell GPU.
