Coral NPU: A full-stack platform for Edge AI
(research.google)79 points by LER0ever 3 days ago
79 points by LER0ever 3 days ago
Will be interested to see what their developer kit looks like when (and if) they release it.
I've been experimenting with the BeagleY-AI to build a little edge AI gizmo with a camera (Texas Insturments SoC + 4 TOPS NPU in RPi 5 form factor)
https://docs.beagleboard.org/boards/beagley/ai/demos/using-e...
It seems here that Google provides the core IP, and that Synaptic packages this (and probably other related IP blocks) block that can be used to build a SoC. As of now there are no chips announced. So it will be some years before we as software/electronics engineers get to play with it.
The architecture seems to be RISC-V array with standard RVV vector instruction set. That is a quite familiar environment for software developers compared to custom systolic arrays.
I think they announced 5 chips[0] in the SL2610 product line[1] today. It appears they're combining 1-2 ARM Cortex-A55 with a Cortex-M52 and a 1 TOPS NPU. Somewhat more complete data sheet here[2] (which is still a bit anemic, IMHO) There are photos of the devkit hardware that will be offered at [6] if you scroll up a little bit.
The original Google Coral lineup offered a 4TOPS accelerator back in 2018-2020.[3][4]
The original (4 TOPS) Coral used ~1 watt while this new Coral TPU is designed for 10mW/0.5 TOPS.[5] That power budget fits well alongside low power MCU's.
It doesn't appear to include any hardware accelerated video encoding[6] for H264/etc, which was also a massive limitation of the original google coral (improved slightly in the Dev Board Mini). There's a lot of documentation on consuming WebRTC content, and while streaming out is mentioned ... any encoding would have to be performed on one of the A55 cores at dubious performance levels. The RK3588, for example, includes a VPU for hardware accelerated video encoding (H264/HEVC encoding @ 8k30fps).
0: https://cdn.bfldr.com/ZU41R0OK/at/tjm5s8hrmz5mgqrjtsrc5c4/sl...
1: https://www.synaptics.com/products/embedded-processors/sl261...
2: https://cdn.bfldr.com/ZU41R0OK/at/ks4thp8bw9n3bt2ktms3k34s/s...
3: https://abopen.com/news/google-launches-coral-edge-tpu-devel...
4: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/new-coral-products-for-...
5: https://developers.google.com/coral/guides/power
6: https://synaptics-astra.github.io/doc/v/latest/linux/index.h...
the coral tpu does what it does and it's not bad at it. The documentation is good , and quite a few people use them practically. They're available readily.
What's upsetting about the state? Continued development?
however, to your point : being google affiliated is a huge red-flag for longevity.
This is blatantly false. There are MLIR based backhands for other languages. This is explicitly mentioned on the landing page at https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-coral-npu-a....
Please language troll somewhere else.
Also seems the core hardware was open-sourced? Github: https://github.com/google-coral/coralnpu