Can NVidia Bake a Better Pi Than Raspberry?

Introduction

I love my Raspberry Pi, but I find it’s limited 1Gig of RAM can be quite restricting. It is still pretty amazing what you can do with these $35 computers. I was disappointed when the Raspberry Foundation announced that the Raspberry Pi 4 is still over a year away, so I started to look at Raspberry Pi alternatives. I wanted something with 4Gig of RAM and a faster ARM processor. I was considering purchasing an Odroid N2, when I saw the press release from NVidia’s Developer Conference that they just released their NVidia Jetson Nano Developer Kit. This board has a faster ARM A57 quad core processor, 4 Gig of RAM plus the bonus of a 128 core Maxwell GPU. The claim being that this is an ideal DIY computer for those interested in AI and machine learning (i.e. me). It showed up for sale on arrow.com, so I bought one and received it via FedEx in 2 days.

Setup

If you already have a Raspberry Pi, setup is easy, since you can unplug things from the Pi and plug them into the Nano, namely the power supply, keyboard, monitor and mouse. Like the Pi, the Nano runs from a microSD card, so I reformatted one of my Pi cards to a download of the variant of Ubuntu Linux that NVidia provides for these. Once the operating system was burned to the microSD card, I plugged it into the Nano and away I went.

One difference from the Pi is that the Nano does not have built in Wifi or Bluetooth. Fortunately the room I’m setting this up in has a wired Internet port, so I went into the garage and found a long Internet cable in my box of random cables, plugged it in and was all connected to the Internet. You can plug a USB Wifi dongle in if you need Wifi, or there is an M.2 E slot (which is hard to access) for an M.2 Wifi card. Just be careful of compatibility, since the drivers need to be compiled for ARM64 Linux.

The board doesn’t come with a case, but the box folds into a stand to hold the board. For now that is how I’m running. If they sell enough of these, I’m sure cases will appear, but you will need to ensure there is enough ventilation for the huge heat sink.

Initial Impressions

The Jetson Nano certainly feels faster than the Raspberry Pi. This is all helped by the faster ARM processor, the quadrupled memory, using the GPU cores for graphics acceleration and that the version of Linux is 64 Bit (unlike Raspbian which is 32 Bit). It ran the pre installed Chromium Browser quite well.

As I installed more software, I found that writing large amounts of data to the microSD card can be a real bottleneck, and I would often have to wait for it to catch up. This is more pronounced than on the Pi, probably because other things are quite slow as well. It would be nice if there was an M.2 M interface for an NVMe SSD drive, but there isn’t. I ordered a faster microSD card (over three times faster than what I have) and hope that helps. I can also try putting some things on a USB SSD, but again this isn’t the fastest.

I tried running the TensorFlow MNIST tutorial program. The version of TensorFlow for this is 1.11. If I want to try TensorFlow 2.0, I’ll have to compile it myself for ARM64, which I haven’t attempted yet. Anyway, TensorFlow automatically used the GPU and executed the tutorial orders of magnitude faster than the Pi (a few minutes versus several hours). So I was impressed with that.

This showed up another gotcha. The GPU cores and CPU share the same memory. So when TensorFlow used the GPU, that took a lot of memory away from the CPU. I was running the tutorial in a Jupyter notebook running locally, so that meant I was running a web server, Chromium, Python, and then TensorFlow with bits on the CPU and GPU. This tended to use up all memory and then things would grind to a halt until garbage collection sorted things out. Running from scratch was fine, but running iteratively felt like it kept hitting a wall. I think the lesson here is that to do machine learning training on this board, I really have to use a lighter Python environment than Jupyter.

The documentation mentions a utility to control the processor speeds of the ARM cores and GPU cores, so you can tune the heat produced. I think this is more for if you embed the board inside something, but beware this sucker can run hot if you keep all the various processors busy.

How is it so Cheap?

The NVidia Jetson Nano costs $99 USD. The Odroid is $79 so it is fairly competitive with other boards trying to be super-Pis. However, it is cheaper than pretty much any NVidia graphics card and even their Nano compute board (which has no ports and costs $129 in quantities of 1000).

The obvious cost saving is no Wifi and no bluetooth. Another is the lack of a SATA or M.2 M interface. It does have a camera interface, a serial interface and a Pi like GPIO block.

The Nano has 128 Maxwell GPU cores. Sounds impressive, but remember most graphics cards have 700 to 4000 cores. Further Maxwell is the oldest supported platform (version 5) where as the newest is the version 7 Volta core.

I think NVidia is keeping the cost low, to get the DIY crowd using their technologies, they’ve seen the success of the Raspberry Pi community and want to duplicate it for their various processor boards. I also think they want to be in the ARM board game, so as better ARM processors come out, they might hope to supplant Intel in producing motherboards for desktop and laptop computers.

Summary

If the Raspberry Pi 4 team can produce something like this for $35 they will have a real winner. I’m enjoying playing with the board and learning what it can do. So far I’ve been pretty impressed. There are some limitations, but given the $100 price tag, I don’t think you can lose. You can play with parallel processing with the GPU cores, you can interface to robots with the GPIO pins, or play with object recognition via the camera interface.

For an DIY board, there are a lot of projects you can take on.