Every person is aware of the fact that AI and machine learning is the next big thing. Slowly, the two technologies are making their way in the real world. On the same league, Nvidia has unveiled the $99 AI computer Jetson Nano along with a developer kit of the Nano, for the developers, makers, and researchers, in its GTC conference held on Monday.
The company has already introduced its Jetson embedded graphics platform and the Jetson Nano Developer kit is the extension of the same. The Nvidia’s Jetson line up works towards providing products to help makers, developers and the students, in the projects based on robotics, AI and autonomous machine applications.
In 2015, the company came with the Jetson TX1 “Supercomputer-on-Module” which provided brains to the robots, drones, and self-driving vehicles. It was the first step for the company in the field of AI and machine learning. After TX1, the company had launched TX2 embedded with a 256-core Pascal GPU and a Jetson AGX Xavier embedded with a 512-core Nvidia Volta GPU. All the three Nvidia’s AI products were high-end products.
But the Jetson Nano is an affordable and tiny $99 computer optimized for AI and machine learning, embedded with 128 CUDA core GPU. The Jetson Nano is based on the Maxwell architecture and offers 472 GFLOPs and is powered by a 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A57-based CPU and a 4GB RAM. The computer also possesses a video processor, which is able to handle up to 4K 30fps encode or 4K 60fps decode. It also has got support for the Gigabit Ethernet, microSD storage, I/O for cameras, and other ports and interfaces, including USB-C.
The Nano kit is a plug and plays DIY kit, which also supports a few AI frameworks including TensorFlow, PyTorch, Caffe, Keras, and MXNet.
Although the Jetson Nano is not as powerful as Nvidia’s previous models, the new Jetson Nano, being cheaper, may help many hobbyists and students with their DIY projects. The company is also offering the production-ready kits for $129, for some specific companies and people who want to build their own AI devices.
The company has also introduced a $250 autonomous robotics kit named JetBot at the event. The JetBot is specially designed to build a self-driving robot.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.