Google releases two new hardware products, Coral dev board and a USB accelerator built around its Edge TPU chip

Google teased its new hardware products built around its Edge TPU at the Google Next conference last summer. Yesterday, it officially launched the Coral dev board, a Raspberry-Pi look-alike, which is designed to run machine learning algorithms ‘at the edge’, and a USB accelerator.

Coral Development Board

The “Coral Dev Board” has a 40-pin header that runs Linux on an i.MX8M with an Edge TPU chip for accelerating TensorFlow Lite. The board also features 8GB eMMC storage, 1GB LPDDR4 RAM, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1. It has USB 2.0/3.0 ports, 3.5mm audio jack, DSI display interface, MIPI-CSI camera interface, HDMI 2.0a connector, and two Digital PDM microphones.

Source: Google

Coral dev board can be used as a single-board computer when you need accelerated ML processing in a small form factor.  It can also be used as an evaluation kit for the SOM and for prototyping IoT devices and other embedded systems. This board is available for $149.00. Google has also announced a $25 MIPI-CSI 5-megapixel camera for the dev board.

USB Accelerator

The USB Accelerator is basically a plug-in USB 3.0 stick to add machine learning capabilities to the existing Linux machines. This 65 x 30 mm accelerator can connect to Linux-based systems via a USB Type-C port. It can also work with a Raspberry Pi board at USB 2.0 speeds. The accelerator is built around a 32-bit, 32MHz Cortex-M0+ chip with 16KB of flash and 2KB of RAM.

Source: Google

The USB Accelerator is available for $75.

Developers can build Machine Learning models for both the devices in TensorFlow Lite. More information is available on Google’s Coral Beta website. Coming soon are the PCI-E Accelerator, for integrating the Edge TPU into legacy systems using a PCI-E interface. Also coming is a fully integrated System-on-Module with CPU, GPU, Edge TPU, Wifi, Bluetooth, and Secure Element in a 40mm x 40mm pluggable module.

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