Aaeon’s M.2 and mini-PCIe “AI Edge Computing Modules” are based on Kneron’s energy-efficient, dual Cortex-M4-enabled KL520 AI SoC, which offers 0.3 TOP NPU performance on only half a Watt.
Aaeon took an early interest in edge AI acceleration with Arm-based Nvidia Jetson TX2 based computers such as the Boxer-8170AI. More recently, it has been delivering M.2 and mini-PCIe form-factor AI Core accessories for its Boxer computers and UP boards equipped with Intel Movidius Myriad 2 and Myriad X Vision Processing Units (VPUs). Now, it has added another approach to AI acceleration by launching a line of M.2 and mini-PCIe AI acceleration cards built around Kneron’s new KL520 AI SoC.
Aaeon is taking orders for three KL520-based AI Edge Computing Modules cards aimed at IoT, smart home, security, and mobile devices:
- M2AI-2280-520 — M.2 B-Key 2280
- M2AI-2242-520 — M.2 2242
- Mini-AI-520 — mini-PCIe
Aaeon’s 0 to 70°C tolerant AI Edge Computing Modules operate at 0.5W to 0.9W. There do not appear to be any functional differences between the three modules, which all supply UART and JTAG debug interfaces and communicate with the host processor via USB signals. The modules support acceleration for ONNX, TensorFlow, Keras, Caffe frameworks with models including Vgg16, Resnet, GoogleNet, YOLO, Tiny YOLO, Lenet, MobileNet, and DenseNet.
