Upgrading the Jetson Nano to "Super"
By Aaron Marburg
In late December, Nvidia announced their Jetson Nano “Super”, announcing a dramatic increase in ML performance at half the cost of the existing Nano. Since we just bought our Nano in October, at first I was disappointed that we had just missed out on a major system version (and paid more for the privilege).
As I dug into it, I realized, along with others, that the Nano “Super” was in fact the exact same hardware (as the existing 8GB Nano) with a new NVP mode. It’s a software upgrade (and yes, a hefty price drop)!
Since our test Nano was running Jetpack 6.1 already, I had hoped that I could get the new NVP models by a simple apt-get upgrade, but the BSP notes say:
MaxN mode is available only when flashing with the jetson-orin-nano-devkit-super configurations.
so there must be some modifications in the earlier phases of the bootloader.
So … back to SDK manager, and I re-flased the Nano with “6.1rev1”, and lo and behold:
> nvpmodel -p --verbose
...
NVPM VERB: POWER_MODEL: ID=2 NAME=MAXN
NVPM VERB: CPU_ONLINE CORE_0 1
NVPM VERB: CPU_ONLINE CORE_1 1
NVPM VERB: CPU_ONLINE CORE_2 1
NVPM VERB: CPU_ONLINE CORE_3 1
NVPM VERB: CPU_ONLINE CORE_4 1
NVPM VERB: CPU_ONLINE CORE_5 1
NVPM VERB: FBP_POWER_GATING FBP_PG_MASK 2
NVPM VERB: TPC_POWER_GATING TPC_PG_MASK 240
NVPM VERB: GPU_POWER_CONTROL_ENABLE GPU_PWR_CNTL_EN on
NVPM VERB: CPU_A78_0 MIN_FREQ 729600
NVPM VERB: CPU_A78_0 MAX_FREQ 9223372036854775807
NVPM VERB: CPU_A78_1 MIN_FREQ 729600
NVPM VERB: CPU_A78_1 MAX_FREQ 9223372036854775807
NVPM VERB: CPU_A78_2 MIN_FREQ 729600
NVPM VERB: CPU_A78_2 MAX_FREQ 9223372036854775807
NVPM VERB: CPU_A78_3 MIN_FREQ 729600
NVPM VERB: CPU_A78_3 MAX_FREQ 9223372036854775807
NVPM VERB: CPU_A78_4 MIN_FREQ 729600
NVPM VERB: CPU_A78_4 MAX_FREQ 9223372036854775807
NVPM VERB: CPU_A78_5 MIN_FREQ 729600
NVPM VERB: CPU_A78_5 MAX_FREQ 9223372036854775807
NVPM VERB: GPU MIN_FREQ 0
NVPM VERB: GPU MAX_FREQ 9223372036854775807
NVPM VERB: GPU_POWER_CONTROL_DISABLE GPU_PWR_CNTL_DIS auto
NVPM VERB: EMC MAX_FREQ 9223372036854775807
So the new MaxN mode exists. I assume the max frequency of “9223372036854775807” means effectively “as fast as possible”?