Google Coral Dev Board

2020: Start of sales of Coral Dev Board Mini

On October 19, 2020 Google began sales of Coral Dev Board Mini, the platform for creation of the IoT-equipment with the AI elements. Development is available to the preorder on the website Seeed, its cost - $99.99.

The innovation size from Google is 48 mm x 64 mm, distinctive feature is the AI/ML accelerator provided by the Google Edge TPU coprocessor up to 4 TOPS as a part of the module Coral Accelerator. For this element the company states the high performance of machine learning.

Google opened the preorder for the platform for creation of the IoT-equipment with the AI elements

Coral Dev Board Mini is equipped with the MediaTek 8167S chip with four cores of Cortex A35 and also the graphic processor Imagination PowerVR GE8300. RAM of Coral Dev Board Mini - 2 GB of LPDDR3, a flash memory - eMMC of 8 GB.

External interfaces include two ports USB Type C, the FFC connector for connection of cameras and also mini-Jack's slot. Connection of sensors through 40 contacts of GPIO is available to the user.

Network connection is performed via module WiFi 5. Existence of exits of micro-HDMI 1.4 allows to connect the device to the computer or the TV. Coral Dev Board Mini is equipped with the audioconnector of 3.5 mm, the digital PDM microphone and the 2-contact connector for the loudspeaker of 2.54 mm.

Coral Dev Board Mini supports the graphic Linux Mendel distribution kit that allows to use innovation as an alternative to popular Raspberry Pi. Among device advantages from Google It should be noted existence of the built-in Google Edge TPU coprocessor which provides performance 4 TOPS. It is responsible for acceleration of algorithms of deep and machine learning. It is supposed that use of this solution will allow to exceed Raspberry Pi performance. As of October 21, 2020 Coral Dev Board Mini are sold out. Delivery of the reserved payments is planned at the end of October, 2020.^[1]

2019: Beginning of sales

In March, 2019 Google released the Coral Dev Board minicomputer which is the platform for creation of the equipment of Internet of Things with opportunities of artificial intelligence.

Innovation is based on the tensor processor (TPU) developed especially for machine learning of neural networks. In a case with Coral Dev Board the solution Edge TPU capable to work with neuronets of direct distribution, including with convolution networks, for processing of video of high resolution with a frame frequency of 30 fps is applied.

The processor sends and obtains data through PCIe and USB and also uses a program stack of Google Cloud IoT Edge for data management and their processing.

Google began sales of the platform for creation of the IoT-equipment with the AI elements

Edge TPU is not absolutely similar to the accelerators used in data centers of Google in work of different services including Google Photos, Google Cloud Vision and Google Search. These accelerators are complemented with liquid cooling and are placed in server racks whereas Edge TPU have the miniature sizes (a quarter of a monetary coin), execute calculations without connection to the Internet, supplementing traditional microcontrollers and sensors.

Edge TPU do not train models of machine learning. Instead the processor starts a logical output (forecasting) with light version of TensorFlow which is more energy efficient, than infrastructure of a complete stack of TensorFlow Lite.

Dev Board works at a software platform of Mendel constructed on Linux kernel. The cost of a payment is $150.

Also on sale Coral USB Accelerator (the USB device for acceleration of process of machine learning in the existing Raspberry Pi and Linux systems) and the 5-megapixel camera for 25 dollars under the name of Google Coral arrived.^[2]

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