This article is part of our GTC 2022 coverage. You can also check out more TechXchange Talks videos.
NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2022) had a number of technology announcements. One of them was the Jetson AGX Orin Development Kit coming in at just under $2,000 (Fig. 1). The AGX Orin is built around a system-on-chip that includes a dozen Arm Cortex-A78 CPUs. The GPU is powered by multiple Ampere Tensor cores. There's also an NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator (DLA). It's ideal for applications like robotics that perform real-time processing using machine-learning models.
The system can deliver over 275 INT8 TOPS. Half of this improvement compared to the previous version is due to the hardware enhancements. The other half is done by improving the software especially for sparse models.
The platform has 32 GB of RAM with a transfer rate of 204 Gbits/s. The overall system, with its carrier board, has a pair of slots underneath. One is designed for peripherals. The other is a full-size socket that can accommodate an NVMe solid-state disk.
The development kit is not designed for production use, although it could be used for small quantities. A $1,599 version designed for production is the top of the line for the Jetson family. This particular model will fit in the same form factor as the AGX Xavier boards.
Some of the other carrier boards designed for production use include Connect Tech's Rogue X (Fig. 2). One of Rogue X's features is its six 2-lane or four 4-lane MIPI CSI camera inputs. There's also a pair of XIMEA xiX inputs; the carrier board has one M.2 M key socket. There are connectors for dual Gigabit Ethernet as well as three USB 3.1 Type-A connectors.
Diamond Systems’ Stevie is another carrier board (Fig. 3). It also has a Mini-PCI Express (mini-PCIe) socket along with a full-size 2280 M.2 socket that could handle a solid-state disk.
ADLINK has a number of systems available. The DLAP-401-Xavier is actually a full system, including a case. Inside you can pop in an M.2 E key or M.2 B key (Fig. 4). Externally, it has dual Gigabit Ethernet connections as well as a USB 3.1 Type-A and USB Type-C connection.
