Raspberry Pi 5 vs Jetson Nano: Budget Edge AI Latency Test

The $60 vs $99 Edge AI Question

You've got $100 and need to ship an edge AI demo next month. The internet says "Pi 5 is faster" or "Jetson has CUDA" but nobody shows you what happens when you actually run inference on both.

I tested the same MobileNetV2 model on both boards with identical inputs. The Jetson Nano pulled ahead by 38ms per frame at FP16, but the Pi 5 won on INT8 quantized models. The gap wasn't what the spec sheets promised.

Here's what the $39 price difference actually buys you.

Photo by Mathias Wouters on Pexels

Hardware You're Actually Comparing

Raspberry Pi 5 (4GB): $60, ARM Cortex-A76 quad-core at 2.4GHz, VideoCore VII GPU, 4GB LPDDR4X-4267. No dedicated AI accelerator. Runs inference on CPU or GPU via OpenGL compute shaders.

Jetson Nano (4GB): $99 (when in stock), ARM Cortex-A57 quad-core at 1.43GHz, 128-core Maxwell GPU with CUDA support, 4GB LPDDR4. Ships with TensorRT for optimized inference.

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