Marcelo Sanchez Showcases the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit's Emulation Capabilities
If you're looking to deploy a project, emulation will let you preview its performance on lower-end Jetson Orin hardware.
Embedded software engineer Marcelo Sanchez has written a guide on preparing NVIDIA Jetson projects for deployment — by emulating lower-powered system-on-module (SOM) variants, like the Jetson Orin Nano, on the high-end Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit.
Launched last year, the NVIDIA AGX Orin Developer Kit is a compact cube designed to put an incredible amount of computational power on your desk. Based around a 12-core Arm CPU, 32GB of RAM, and an Ampere-class graphics card offering 2,048 CUDA cores, 64 Tensor cores, and additional two NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator v2 (NVLDA) and single Programmable Vision Accelerator v2 (PVA) coprocessors, it's a beast — and one which aims to make it possible to develop for any device in the Jetson ecosystem.
While the heart of the Developer Kit is an AGX Orin system-on-module, though, NVIDIA isn't expecting anyone to put the full thing in a design. Instead, the Developer Kit is used for — what else — development, with the project then deployed onto the Jetson SOM best-suited for the workload. But how to tell which model from the range has the balance of power and performance required? Emulation.
"Development for any of the NVIDIA Jetson Orin family modules can be done using only the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit," Sanchez explains. "This developer kit enables you to emulate natively any of the NVIDIA Jetson Orin modules, including Jetson Orin NX and Jetson Orin Nano. It emulates the hardware specifications of the chosen module, and therefore replicates its performance. The main advantage of the emulation feature is that you only need one kit to develop any product targeted to any Jetson Orin module. This speeds up the prototyping phase, but also cuts costs significantly."
By flashing differing configurations onto the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit, Sanchez explains, it's possible to have the device deactivate various hardware functions in order to match the performance of other Orin-family SOMs — from the top-end AGX Orin modules themselves through the mid-range Orin NX modules and even the entry-level Orin Nano modules. Once finished, you can flash back to the default settings — restoring the Developer Kit's true performance.
Sanchez' full guide is now available on the NVIDIA Developer Blog.