The Tutorial Trap
Every Pi 5 vs Jetson Nano comparison you'll find online runs the same sanitized demo: a fresh install, a toy MobileNet model, clean NCHW inputs, and maybe 100 inference runs. The Jetson wins by 2-3x, everyone nods, and the post ends.
But ship that same setup into a real edge deployment — where you're decoding video streams, juggling USB bandwidth, dealing with thermal throttling after 20 minutes, and running other services alongside your model — and those benchmarks fall apart. I've watched a Pi 5 outperform a Jetson Nano in production purely because the Jetson choked on H.264 decode while the Pi's hardware encoder kept chugging.
This post runs both boards through the messy reality tutorial authors skip: concurrent video processing, memory-constrained batch sizes, thermal throttling under sustained load, and the hidden costs of USB 2.0 on the Jetson.
Inference Speed: The Only Part Tutorials Get Right
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