BeagleBoard often gets eclipsed by Raspberry Pi. Where the Pi focuses on ease-of-use, the BeagleBone generally has more power for hardcore applications. With machine learning AI all the rage now, BeagleBoard now has the BeagleBone AI, a board with specific features aimed at machine learning. A recent video (see below) shows a demo of using TIDL (Texas Instruments Deep Learning Library). The video includes an example of streaming video to a browser and using predefined learning models to identify things picked up by a web camera.
The CPU onboard is the TI Sitara AM5729. That’s a dual Arm Cortex A15 running at 1.5 GHz. There are also two C66x floating-point DSP processors and two dual ARM Cortex M4 coprocessors. Still need more? You get four embedded vision engines, two dual-core real-time units, a 2D graphics accelerator, a 3D graphics accelerator, and a subsystem for encoding and decoding video and cryptography.
There’s quite a bit of memory, too. In addition to off-chip memory, there’s 2.5 MB of memory on the device.
The demo doesn’t require any new software on the board. You don’t even need a monitor for the board since the video streams to an external web browser. Pretty cool.
We covered this device back when it was first announced. One thing we really like about the Beagles is the prehiperal real-time units.
