Nvidia upgrades AI developer board software, claims a 70% performance boost

Nvidia on Tuesday announced an upgrade to its entry-level AI developer board.

Dubbed the "Jetson Orin Nano Super," the new product utilizes the same computing and graphics cores as its predecessor, the Jetson Orin Nano, released in 2022. The key difference – and what makes it "super" – lies in the software upgrade. Nvidia claims it provides a 70 percent performance boost under specific conditions.

Notably, this software upgrade is also available for the original Jetson Orin Nano. It offers the same performance boost from 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) to 67 TOPS with 8-bit integer precision (INT8).

Despite sharing near identical hardware with its predecessor, the new developer board is priced at $249 – a significant drop from the previous $499, according to Nvidia's press release.

While Nvidia markets the new product as a "compact generative AI supercomputer," its 67 TOPS performance is considerably lower than the company's product for gaming laptops, let alone a true supercomputer equipped with thousands of AI chips.