Develop for All Six NVIDIA Jetson Orin Modules with the Power of One Developer Kit

With the Jetson Orin Nano announcement this week at GTC, the entire Jetson Orin module lineup is now revealed. With up to 40 TOPS of AI performance, Orin Nano modules set the new standard for entry-level AI, just as Jetson AGX Orin is already redefining robotics and other autonomous edge use cases with 275 TOPS of server class compute.

All Jetson Orin modules and the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit are based on a single SoC architecture with an NVIDIA Ampere Architecture GPU, a high-performance CPU, and the latest accelerators. This shared architecture means you can develop software for one Jetson Orin module and then easily deploy it to any of the others.

You can begin development today for any Jetson Orin module using the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit. The developer kit’s ability to natively emulate performance for any of the modules lets you start now and shorten your time to market. The developer kit can accurately emulate the performance of any Jetson Orin modules by configuring the hardware features and clocks to match that of the target module.

Development teams benefit from the simplicity of needing only one type of developer kit, irrespective of which modules are targeted for production. This also simplifies CI/CD infrastructure. Whether you are developing for robotics, video analytics, or any other use case, the capability of this one developer kit brings many benefits.

Transform the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit into any Jetson Orin module

With one step, you can transform a Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit into any one of the Jetson Orin modules. We provide flashing configuration files for this process.

Emulating Jetson Orin module on the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit, follows the same steps as mentioned in to flash a Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit using the flashing utilities. After placing your developer kit in Force Recovery Mode, the flash.sh command-line tool is used to flash it with a new image. For example, the following command flashes the developer kit with its default configuration:

$ sudo ./flash.sh jetson-agx-orin-devkit mmcblk0p1

The exact command that you use should be modified with the name of the flash configuration appropriate for your targeted Jetson Orin module being emulated. For example, to emulate a Jetson Orin NX 16GB module, use the following command:

$ sudo ./flash.sh jetson-agx-orin-devkit-as-nx-16gb mmcblk0p1

Table 1 lists the Jetson Orin modules and the flash.sh command appropriate for each.

Flash configurations for Jetson Orin Nano modules are not yet included in NVIDIA JetPack, as of version 5.0.2. Use these new configurations after downloading them and applying an overlay patch on top of NVIDIA JetPack 5.0.2 per the instructions found inside the downloaded file.

For more information about the flashing configurations useful for emulation, see Emulation Flash Configurations.

After flashing is complete, complete the initial bootup and configuration. Then you can install the rest of the NVIDIA JetPack components using SDK Manager or simply by using a package manager on the running developer kit:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nvidia-jetpack

Now you have the developer kit running and NVIDIA JetPack installed. Your Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit now emulates the performance and power of the specified Jetson Orin module.

Accurately emulate any Jetson Orin module

This native emulation is accurate because it configures the developer kit to match the clock frequencies, number of GPU and CPU cores, and hardware accelerators available with the target module.

For example, when emulating the Jetson Orin NX 16GB module:

• The developer kit GPU is configured with 1024 CUDA cores and 32 Tensor Cores with a max frequency of 918 MHz.
• The CPU complex is configured with eight Arm Cortex-A78AE cores running at 2 GHz.
• The DRAM is configured to 16 GB with a bandwidth of 102 GB/s.
• The system offers the same power profiles supported by the Jetson Orin NX 16GB module.

Open the Jetson Power graphical user interface from the top menu on the desktop and you see that the system has been configured accurately as per the target module being emulated. Max clocks can be configured by running the following command, and the Jetson Power graphical user interface will show the change.

sudo jetson_clocks

Figure 2 shows the Jetson Power graphical user interface after configuring max clocks when the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit is flashed to an emulated Jetson AGX Orin 64GB module compared to when flashed to emulate a Jetson Orin NX 16GB module.

By running various samples provided with NVIDIA JetPack, you can see that the performance is adjusted to match that of the module being emulated. For example, the benchmarking sample packaged with the VPI library can be used to show CPU, GPU, and PVA performance for Jetson AGX Orin 64GB, Jetson Orin NX 16GB, and Jetson Orin Nano 8GB modules after configuring the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit to emulate the respective module.

To run the VPI benchmarking sample, use the following commands:

cd /opt/nvidia/vpi2/samples/05-benchmark
sudo cmake .
sudo make
sudo ./vpi_sample_05_benchmark <cpu/cuda/pva>

The VPI benchmarking sample outputs the latency in milliseconds for the Gaussian algorithm. Table 2 shows the results for each of the targeted modules.

Similarly, you can run multimedia samples for encode and decode.

For decode, run the following commands:

cd /usr/src/jetson_multimedia_api/samples/00_video_decode
sudo make
sudo ./video_decode H264 --disable-rendering --stats --max-perf <input file>

For encode, run the following commands:

cd /usr/src/jetson_multimedia_api/samples/01_video_encode
sudo make
sudo ./video_encode input.yuv 1920 1080 H264 out.h264 -fps 30 1 -ifi 1000 -idri 1000 --max-perf --stats

Table 3 reports the FPS numbers after running these encode and decode samples using H.264 1080P 30FPS video streams.

*Jetson Orin Nano does not include a NVEncoder. For Table 3, encoding for Jetson Orin Nano was done on CPU using ffmpeg. 110 FPS is achieved when using four CPU cores. When using two CPU cores, FPS of 73 was achieved, and when using a single CPU core, FPS of 33 was achieved.

To demonstrate the accuracy of emulation, we ran some AI model benchmarks on the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit emulated as Jetson AGX Orin 32GB. We then compared it with results obtained by running the same benchmarks on the real Jetson AGX Orin 32GB module. As you can see from the results, the difference between emulated and real performance is insignificant.

Although Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit includes a 32GB module, it provides the same level of performance and comes with 275 TOPS matching the Jetson AGX Orin 64GB. There is no special flashing configuration required for emulation of Jetson AGX Orin 64 GB but you must use the appropriate flashing configuration to emulate Jetson AGX Orin 32GB on Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit.

Do end-to-end development for any Jetson Orin module

You can work with the entire Jetson software stack while emulating a Jetson Orin module. Frameworks such as NVIDIA DeepStream, NVIDIA Isaac, and NVIDIA Riva work in emulation mode, and tools like TAO Toolkit perform as expected with pretrained models from NGC. The software stack is agnostic of the emulation and the performance accurately matches that of the target being emulated.

If you are developing a robotics use case or developing a vision AI pipeline, you can do end-to-end development today for any Jetson Orin module using the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit and emulation mode.

Develop robotics applications with NVIDIA Isaac ROS for any Jetson Orin module. Just use the right flashing configuration to flash and start your ROS development. Figure 5 shows running Isaac ROS Stereo Disparity DNN on the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit emulated as Jetson Orin Nano 8GB.

Develop vision AI pipelines using DeepStream on the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit for any Jetson Orin module. It just works!

Figure 6 shows an IVA pipeline running people detection using DeepStream on the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit emulated as Jetson Orin Nano 8GB with four streams of H.265 1080P 30FPS.

Get to market faster with the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit 

With the emulation support, you can get to production faster by starting and finishing your application development on the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit. Buy the kit and start your development. We will also cover emulation in detail in the upcoming NVIDIA JetPack 5.0.2 webinar. Register for the webinar today!