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Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

Even with the lower price point it's still a bit of an odd fit. The dev kit is aimed at developers but costs about the same as a 3060 (which will blow it out of the water on AI performance and capacity). Unless this board was already the one you were targeting for non-development usage for your robotics/embedded edge use case then I'm not sure there is a compelling reason to be interested in the announcement.

Edit: I didn't mean to imply it's a bad use case or product, just that it's not a use case 95% here are going to care about. It's an odd fit but if you're the target of that fit it's great. If you're not that odd fit target, don't get your hopes up about a low cost AI dev kit from Nvidia. It'll just be another SBC sitting unused in your drawer.

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In the world of embedded compute modules, "developer kit" isn't the equivalent of a "developer workstation" with super-high specs.

Instead, it means "We sell this module for use on PCBs, but you want to start developing software and testing before you've made your first PCB. Here's the module plugged into a PCB that provides USB, HDMI and Ethernet connectors. We'll also throw in a power supply and an SD card with a working OS image on it."

I agree 100%, edited with clarification to cause less confusion since most seemed to take it I was saying the opposite. Thanks for the clear description of what I failed to describe.

Are USB, HDMI, and Ethernet really the ports you want for your embedded system?

Depends what you're doing with it. You can just glue this dev board in to your hobby system, or if you're making an interactive kiosk, maybe you want a usb webcam & hdmi screen. If you want to debug, those ports can be pretty handy, you can have a monitor and keyboard on it. If you do your own pcb integration, you can decide what ports you want on your board.

If you want to connect a screen, keyboard and mouse? Or plug in a wifi dongle? Absolutely!

And by the point you don't need them, you can graduate from the dev kit and spin your own PCB without them on, if you like.

The development kit will probably break out other signals too - but if you know what SPI and CSI are, you probably don't need to be told what an embedded dev kit is :)

On an embedded system out in the field? Depends on the use.

On your prototype devkit? Absolutely.

Some people have different views on what’s an embedded system, but hardware serial, USB and Ethernet are tablestakes for interfacing with any most industrial hardware or for robotics uses.

Kinda agree with the other replies to you, the edge case you carved out is the target use case, this is not meant to compete against the 3060, it's meant to be put on robots or other embedded use cases (even as a devkit). 3060 has more juice but it draws 170w vs 25w for the Orin nano (with 15w and 7w modes), and is much smaller.

You can't put a 3060 in a smaller-than-large robot

This is what I mean by "unless this board was already the one you were targeting for non-development usage for your robotics/embedded edge use case". If you're planning on using this board already then sure, you want this dev board update. If you're not that use case of that niche then this announcement will probably not be worth looking in to.

(a) Dev kits are often much more expensive than the production hardware.

(b) Why would you even care about this if a desktop gaming gpu would work for you? It’s an embedded inference module.

I meant to highlight, though apparently did poorly, 95% of people here will fall into (b) as it's not aimed at being the general use AI dev kit they'd want it to be. Unfortunately that seems to have been taken as "the product is useless to those building embedded systems because you can buy a 3060" due to my unclear wording.

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