We are heading into the last few months of the tenth year of JetsonHacks. I want to thank you for being part of the community, and wish you the best and happiness in 2024! Thank you for sharing your experience and knowledge with us.
We’ve hit some fun milestones, like passing more than 4 million views on YouTube. Honestly, that’s a little mind boggling. As usual at this time, I present the hard data about Internet traffic to the site and YouTube channel.
JetsonHacks.com
The big news this year is the introduction of the Jetson Orin Nano. This is now the entry level Jetson, as the original Jetson Nano 4GB is being phased out. Naturally, we saw a bump in traffic when the first articles and videos about the Orin Nano were published.
Another trend that we’re able to see is how people are starting to use products like ChatGPT in their workflow. We’re noticing less engagement with regards to comments and the like. I’ve been thinking through how to take advantage of this trend and shift the focus from basic instruction to a more project based approach for articles and videos.
2023 marked the availability of Jetson development kits again. And with new dev kits come more releases of JetPack! One of the nice things going forward is that the Jetson Orins will have a much more flexible OS architecture. More modern kernels should be easily available, and different Linux distributions will be too.
Let’s take a look at the website traffic:
The numbers are about the same as 2022. There were about twice the number of articles published, and a lot of rearrangement of pages on the website. I’ve tried to make the website easier to use, so that you don’t have to go through as many pages to get to content. That means the pages per visit went down, but that’s a good thing! It will be interesting to see how the numbers look next year.
JetsonHacks Channel on YouTube
The JetsonHacks channel on YouTube had a good bump in traffic compared to last year:
Last year we had 413K views, so a good increase. 18 videos this year, compared to the usual 10 or so. I’ve set a stretch goal for the YouTube channel. We have 34,418 subscribers as of this writing. I think if we can hit 34,503 sometime during the next year we will have done absolutely amazing. A boy can dream, can’t he?
JetsonHacks Newsletter
People have been signing up for the JetsonHacks Newsletter. Every month I write up some news stories and give some insight and opinions on computer related events. We have a pretty good number of people on board, if the Jetson is your thing consider subscribing.
The Road Ahead
2024 marks the return of the NVIDIA GTC in March. It should be great fun to see the sights and sounds! The last one was in 2019, and the company Nvidia has grown by leaps and bounds since then. It’s hard to manage expectations on this one, because I don’t know what to expect!
There are still lots of subjects to cover on JetsonHacks. I haven’t hit on generative AI as much as is warranted. I’m also planning on visiting CUDA and Docker a little more in depth. I have started playing with hardware over the last few weeks, I’m guessing some fun things should come out of that.
Hoping your 2024 is quite swell. Happy New Year!
8 Responses
“More modern kernels should be easily available, and different Linux distributions will be too.”
That’s good to know. I think you could do that on JetPack 4 and 5, but it was a complex process and you probably couldn’t access the NVIDIA-specific hardware. The whole point of a Jetson is that hardware; unless the “different Linux distributions” support it out of the box, they’re non-starters.
It should be easier now. There are people support different Linux distributions. Other people have been working on more recent kernels on JetPack 6. We’ll leave them to work through the issues and sticky bits. The Developer Previews can bit a little at first, and can take a while to tame. Happy New Year!
Yeah … I still don’t have an Orin device, mostly because I can’t keep my 16 GB AGX Xavier busy. 🙂 But there’s not a lot wrong with the Linux part of JetPack 5.x that upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 or any other distro would fix.
I certainly understand. I really like my AGX Xavier.
Thank you for your article and video in YouTube, they help me a lot for my work with Orin device!
You are welcome. Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year!
Let’s be honest, the reason the excitement about Jetson has dropped massively is because Nvidia got greedy. I realise we have inflation, but we also have Moore’s law.
Processing power is meant to get better but not mostly at the expense of cost. The Orin Nano dev kit should have cost £100, or maybe £150 with inflation.
The fact Nvidia are charging £500 takes the mickey. I can do everything I need to on the OG Nano. Unless I want to run a slow and crippled LLM in no-mobile-signal environments I won’t be buying the Orin Nano in any quantity.
I just hope a competitor steps up to stop Nvidia taking advantage of its monopoly position and pricing everything so high. Jetson is still the only range of mobile GPGPUs and it feels like I’m in an abusive relationship. 🙁
Thank you for sharing your opinion. Perhaps the Raspberry Pi 5 will be able to meet many peoples needs when it becomes more widely available. Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year!