Building next-gen AI products with NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin

NVIDIA’s edge computing hardware has been a part of Antmicro’s open hardware platform development throughout all of its generations. This legacy of facilitating proof-of-concept prototyping using open source designs has resulted in our ever-expanding, open ecosystem of hardware platforms, with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano/Xavier NX baseboard leading the way as the most popular example.

The release of the latest addition to the NVIDIA family, the powerful Jetson Orin SoM series, will soon be followed by a new, open source Jetson Orin NX baseboard currently in development at Antmicro.
In the meantime, the team has already been hard at work building emerging products with Orin inside them, combining Antmicro’s hardware development capacities with software, AI and CI/OTA/fleet management solutions to create advanced edge AI devices.

Meet Jetson Orin

Just as in the case of the Jetson family before it, NVIDIA kicked off the Orin lineup with the AGX Orin developer kit capable of emulating the performance of the entire series of SoMs.

The development kit features:

• PCIe x16 slot (with x8 PCIe Gen4 signaling)
• M.2 Key M (x4 PCIe Gen4)
• M.2 Key E (x1 PCIe Gen4, USB, UART, I2S)
• USB Type C: 2x USB 3.2 Gen2 with USB-PD support
• USB Type A: 2x USB 3.2 Gen2, 2x USB 3.2 Gen1
• USB Micro-B: USB 2.0
• DisplayPort 1.4a
• 10 GbE
• 110mm x 110mm x 71.65mm

It makes for a capable prototyping platform, especially for higher-end applications. To enable very early prototyping with the Orin devkit, Antmicro has updated its AGX CSI adapter allowing for use of a variety of video-related compatible accessories, including the adapters we have built for Allied Vision and FRAMOS cameras as well as drivers we have been developing for various customer projects. Those and other accessories are available as open source and can be found on Antmicro’s open source portal.

To cover a broad range of performance levels, NVIDIA has announced three distinct SoM solutions as part of the Jetson Orin generation:

• NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin - high-end SoM shipping in 32GB and 64GB versions
• NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX - mid-range SoM, shipping in 8GB and 16GB versions
• NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano - lower-end SoM, shipping in 4GB and 8GB versions

In a significant leap over the original Jetson SoM family, the Orin generation provides as much as 20 AI TOPS for the lowest-end 4GB Orin Nano and up to 275 TOPS for the top of the range AGX Orin, once again allowing Antmicro to design and build solutions that have never been possible before.

Full technical specifications for the NVIDIA Jetson Orin lineup are available at the NVIDIA website.

Array of edge AI possibilities

The potential created by the computational capabilities and large shared memory for CPU and embedded GPU of the next-gen Jetson enables customers to use Antmicro’s modular solutions and services to create complex, high-end applications, including heavy computer vision processing, that involve multiple deep learning models. These capabilities also enable running inference of one or multiple models on large batches of data in order to fully utilize the parallelization capabilities of the AGX Orin CPU, eGPU and dedicated AI HW blocks.

Antmicro already offers a wide selection of software building blocks compatible with Jetson devices which are now being brought to the new generation products, e.g. the meta-antmicro Yocto layer aimed at creating reproducible AI systems, the Kenning library facilitating ML testing and deployment, or over-the-air update and fleet management systems for embedded devices, which will be described on this blog in more detail in the near future.

Develop next-gen products with Orin and Antmicro

If you are looking to develop custom, integrated products that require substantial computational power of the Orin devices, you will be in good hands at Antmicro. With our experience creating software and software-driven hardware for the Jetson SoMs spanning a decade, we can help you achieve the goals for your project and get ahead of the market, whether you need to develop smart video solutions, AI-enhanced industrial machines, advanced robots, or introduce high-end hardware and software to any other aspect of your project. Feel free to reach out to us at contact@antmicro.com if you have questions or you’d like to discuss implementations for your project.