Jetson Nano vs Raspberry Pi
Nvidia recently announced about its new Jetson Nano 2 GB, which is ideal for teaching, learning and developing Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.
But we are comparing the Jetson with Raspberry Pi, whose aim is to promote the teaching of basic computer science but later it became famous among the Open-Source Developer.
For comparison we will be using Nvidia Jetson Nano and Raspberry Pi 4 (2 Gb Model)
Processor
Both Chip-board are equipped with Arm Based Processor, Raspberry being the earliest to realize the potential, efficiency and power of ARM based Processor.
Now billion of devices from mobile phones, Consumer Electronic, Wearable Devices are relying on ARM.
The Deal of the recent acquirement of ARM is on-going and still not final. But if the deal is final, it will change the future of Jetson.
Talking in the terms of processing power, The latest Raspberry Pi uses quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 which uses 1.5 Ghz 64 bit quad core processor. While talking about Jetson Nano, Quad Core ARM Cortex-A57 which is 1.43 Ghz powerful 64 bit quad core processor.
Here, Raspberry Pi 4 takes an edge and wins by a small margin.
RAM
Jetson uses a 4GB LPDDR4 64 bit Ram offering 25.6 GB/Sec.
Now lets talk about what is LPDDR4, it offers a reduced power consumption but does so at the cost of bandwidth. It is the mobile equivalent of DDR4.
LPDDR5 has more flexible burst in the range of 16 to 32, on the other hand DDR4 it is limited to 8 burst per cycle.
ELI5- What is burst mode?
Burst mode refers to situation in which device is transmitting data repeatedly without going through all the steps required to transmit each piece of data in separate transaction.
In RAM, burst modes are basically implemented by automatically fetching the next memory content before they are requested.
Both have similar RAM with 1600 MHz, hence its a tie in this case.
Both Board can be used MIPI CSI Port.
Video Decode.
Pi4 have hardware accelerated decode for H264, MPEG4, H263.
It also have separate block for HEVC which is driven by the Linux Kernel.
Talking about Jetson Nano
H.264 and H.265 hardware encoding is supported on Jetson Nano.
It is again a tie.
USB Support
Jetson has 4x port supporting 3.0 and USB 2.0 micro Usb.
While Raspberry Pi has 2x 2.0 port and 2x 4.0 port.
Power Under Load and Classification Comparison
After going through many research paper which benchmarked Pi and jetson on classification model, results were impressive, Raspberry had an increase time classifying but the power consumption was in the range of 2.56 W to 7.30 W.
For the Jetson, the range was around 5W-10W.
Classification of the model is analyzed by time, it is seen that it takes place faster time over GPU (Jetson Nano) and increase in time with data set. It reaches the highest in the classification mode via CPU (Raspberry Pi).
Memory errors occur in Jetson Nano and Raspberry PI when dataset size is 20K.
The winner, Clearly Jetson, thought the power consumption is high but that explain the less time which it took to classify and train the model.
Refer to the paper, Benchmark Analysis of Jetson TX2, NANO and Raspberry PI using DEEP-CNN for reference.
Storage both Raspberry Pi and Jetson can support sd card upto 128 GB. (Verified Unofficially).
Networking and Display
Result Raspberry Pi takes and edge Why?
Let’s take a look.
For the display Raspberry has two micro HDMI up to 4k with 60 frame per second and to exaggerate it further, Raspberry Pi can support two monitor at 4k at the same time.
Jetson has a HDMI 2.0 port and eDP 1.4.
Hence, 1 point for Pi.
By the way, Lets not skip whets an eDP 1.4
One of the most important Reason Pi has been soo successful is that is software is up to date.
The general Computing Performance of both the device are comparable, but when its Machine Learning Jetson takes over Raspberry Pi due to its 128 CUDA core GPU, based on the Maxwell architecture. it offers a stunning 472 GFLOPs.
eDP stands for Embedded DisplayPort which is a display panel interface standard for portable and devices.
HDMI was introduced in 2003 by a consortium by tech companies like Sony, Philips and Toshiba.
This is the reason HDMI is the standard for the display.
eDP is an follow up of the older VGA and DVI standards.
eDP supports.
Apart from the Audio Return Channel which adds an extra feature for HDMI to send sound from the display back to the source there is not much difference between both.
Raspberry Pi has built-in Wi-Fi, while the same can be bought for Nano and might cost you an extra 10–20 dollar, it.
Raspberry Pi has dual band 802.11ac wireless LAN and also has Bluetooth 4.2.
Raspberry further allows power over ethernet.
PoE typically provides 48 DV, however Jetson Nano needs 5 volt
Hence, a step down voltage is needed to convert the 48 V source to 5 V.
In terms of Ethernet, Wired Ethernet can give speed up to 10/100/1000 Base-TX x 5.
While the wired ethernet can reach up to 330 Mbps on Raspberry Pi 4.
Final Verdict
Raspberry Pi remains a popular choice among the developer, IOT enthusiast and Open-Source Enthusiast.
Raspberry Pi has a large community support, the number is clearly visible on reddit with over 2.1 million on Raspberry Pi subreddit.
Raspberry has made its way among the community.
Further, Raspberry remains favorite among Linux User, as User have many option to install distros, From Ubuntu, Fedora, Raspbian, RISC OS, Windows IOT Core, RetroPi, etc and trust me I am just scratching the surface, there are lots of Distro you can use on Raspberry Pi, while the official Operating System for Jetson is Linux4Tegra, based on Ubuntu 18.04 that is designed to run Nvidia Hardware.
For Raspberry Pi to actually compete with Jetson, it will be only possible upon the addition of GPU. It is further actually possible to add GPU to Pi, but path to it is costlier as you have to purchase Neural Compute Stick 2 which cost 10,000 Indian Rupees or 135 Dollar, so instead of investing that much it will much better option to buy a 65 Dollar Jetson Nano.
If you are machine learning enthusiast and you want your mini-board to process the data, Jetson Nano is the perfect choice.
With the addition of GPU, Jetson does look promising and the results of the benchmark speak for itself.
