Sure, if you're doing CPU-only tasks, Jetson Nano is A57 and Pi4 is A72 which is maybe twice as fast, but if you can offload anything to the GPU at all (media encoding, neural networks, matrix operations) you'll probably get some enormous gains in efficiency with the Nano.

OTOH, your going to be pretty much stuck with whatever handouts nvidia gives you unless your willing to hack the firmware/etc and reverse engineer stuff.

Pretty much everything works on the existing rpi. Heck you can run Windows IoT on it. It has a UEFI firmware (edk2) port which mostly complete, and pretty much every distro and 3rd party OS supports it. And the hardware itself is mostly open at this point.

This. Jetson is part of NVIDIA's pipeline to drive customers to their chips. Raspberry Pi is vaguely that for Broadcom but is much more an end in and of itself. RPi is massively supported on the web.

If you're doing stuff that needs the Jetson, it's great, but the Pi is definitely better supported.

> Jetson Nano is A57 and Pi4 is A72 which is maybe twice as fast

A57 and A72 are very close in performance, as the A72 is an evolution of the A57. ARM's numbers have the A72 around 20-30% faster than the A57. The main advantage of the A72 was it fixed the horrific power problems the A57 had so in a phone usage you could actually use the CPU for longer than 10 seconds. But in raw performance it wasn't that much of a jump. A53 to A72 is around 2-3x as fast, though. A53 was the power efficient one. A57 was the performance one.

Both the Jetson Nano & Pi4 are clocked at around 1.5ghz, so the Pi4 should still eek out a bit of a CPU performance gap over the Nano. But if you're purely comparing factory vs. factory then the Nano would probably win over longer stretches as the Pi4's lack of heatsink results in it throttling down to around 1ghz after a few minutes. The Nano looks like it has a beefy enough heatsink to keep the A57's churning for a lot longer at their 1.43ghz spec.

How does the Jetson Nano GPU compare to the RPi 4's VideoCore VI?

The Nano's GPU is half of what is available in the Nintendo Switch. Based on some benchmarks I've seen, the one in the Pi 4 should be between 2 and 3 times slower.