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Coral NPU: A full-stack platform for Edge AI

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Re: Coral NPU: A full-stack platform for Edge AI

#11

Post by serf »

fisf wrote: post #8
nerdsniper wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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] Th…

Looking at the state of the original Coral TPU (which was basically abandoned, just like regular other Google stuff), would make me very wary to use this is a long term product.

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.

Re: Coral NPU: A full-stack platform for Edge AI

#12

Post by metadat »

babl-yc wrote: post #10

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...

That's cool, any success stories, challenges or other feedback you can share?

I've only heard of people using Coral PCIe / USB for edge image AI processing tasks like classifying subjects in a stream. Curious if you have the same use case or something different!

Re: Coral NPU: A full-stack platform for Edge AI

#13

Post by jauntywundrkind »

nerdsniper wrote: post #5
jononor wrote: post #2

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 softwar…

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] Th…

Huge amount of drivers, all for 6.12, which is already pretty old. https://github.com/synaptics-astra/linux_6_12-drivers-synapt...

Agreed that that no hardware video encode is pretty damned deflating.

Having such a low power device is incredibly enticing. Thanks for the good details. One random thing I'm kind of excited over, there's 3x I2S audio connections, which has some weird fun use cases (ideally a little field recorder?).

One curious thing, Google's post says they are still trying to finalize the matrix extensions for RISC-V. I'm assuming those simply aren't on these Synaptics chips?

Re: Coral NPU: A full-stack platform for Edge AI

#14

Post by ipsum2 »

serf wrote: post #11
fisf wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the state of the original Coral TPU (which was basically abandoned, just like regular other Google stuff), would make me very wary to use this is a long term product.

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.

They were completely sold out for 2-3 years (2020 onwards), and Google wiped documentation (https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/ redirects to the main page, which has no reference to the original Coral). I can't tell where there's an official place to buy this. I see some on Amazon, but that might be resold.

Re: Coral NPU: A full-stack platform for Edge AI

#17

Post by babl-yc »

metadat wrote: post #12
babl-yc wrote: post #10

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...

That's cool, any success stories, challenges or other feedback you can share? I've only heard of people using Coral PCIe / USB for edge image AI processing tasks like classifying subjects in a stream. Curious if you have the same use case or something different!

I'm trying to make a DIY security camera that can run local models, and stream video over wifi.

The TI SDK makes it easy to run demos but making any custom apps quickly gets complicated unless you are familiar with embedded Linux dev, Yocto, etc. Certainly much more complex than iOS/Android.

Hopefully over time the tools for embedded can catch up to mobile.

Re: Coral NPU: A full-stack platform for Edge AI

#19

Post by yurimo »

I'm guessing you can still find Coral TPU-based boards somewhere but not sure what the support for these will be now that the focus is shifting. Coral TPU also uses subset of tensorflow and its nice to see that the open standard is targeting jax and torch.

When I went to see if anyone is selling the boards or their "Partners" page regarding manufacturing design I got 404 even after signing in: https://developers.google.com/coral/guides/coral/resource

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