Being one of the frontrunners in AI development and having an understanding of the potentials and opportunities in Edge Computing and Local AI,Ā GoogleĀ started its sojourn into the provision of hardware components and companion software tools for the development of Local AI products last year, with the launch of theĀ Coral Platform.
The platform which comprises hardware components like theĀ Coral Dev Board, theĀ Coral USB AcceleratorĀ andĀ PCIe acceleratorsĀ was well received by the community with a diverse range of applications, across a broad set of industries already built on it. However, showing a strong desire to further grow the Coral ecosystem, Google, on Thursday, announced some of the new Coral products that will be released in 2020. The list included; TheĀ Coral Accelerator Module, theĀ Coral Dev Board Mini, and a newĀ Coral System-on-Module.
TheĀ Coral Accelerator ModuleĀ which was developed in partnership withĀ MurataĀ is an easy to integrate Multi-Chip package, power-efficient, and High-Speed on-board Edge TPU coprocessor, capable of performing 4 trillion operations (tera-operations) per second (TOPS), using 0.5 watts for each TOPS (2 TOPS per watt). The module exposes both PCIe and USB interfaces and can easily integrate into custom PCB designs without causing a significant increase in the board size due to its small form factor. The board supportsĀ TensorFlow LiteĀ andĀ AutoML Vision Edge,Ā removing the need to build models from the ground up and facilitating the speedy deployment of high-accuracy custom image classification models.Ā According to Google, the Coral Accelerator Module will be available in the first half of 2020.
The Second Product billed for a 2020 arrival is theĀ Coral Dev Board Mini, which according to Google will provide a smaller form-factor, lower-power, and lower-cost alternative to the Coral Dev Board. The Mini is said to be a combination of the new Coral Accelerator Module with theĀ MediaTek 8167s SoCĀ resulting in a board that excels at 720P video encoding/decoding and computer vision use cases. According to the announcement, the Coral Dev Board Mini will also be available in the first half of 2020.
Read more: GOOGLE ANNOUNCES NEW CORAL PRODUCTS FOR 2020
