Google Announces New Coral products for 2020

Being one of the frontrunners in AI development and having an understanding of the potentials and opportunities in Edge Computing and Local AI, Google 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 the Coral Platform.

The platform which comprises hardware components like the Coral Dev Board, the Coral USB Accelerator and PCIe accelerators 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; The Coral Accelerator Module, the Coral Dev Board Mini, and a new Coral System-on-Module.

The Coral Accelerator Module which was developed in partnership with Murata 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 supports TensorFlow Lite and AutoML Vision Edge, removing the need to build models from the ground up and facilitating the speedy deployment of high-accuracy custom image classification models.  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 the 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 the MediaTek 8167s SoC 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.

Last but not least on the list is a new Coral System-on-Module. The new module is essentially a variation of the previous version and it comes with 2GB and 4GB LPDDR4 RAM in addition to the original 1GB LPDDR4 configuration. It retains all the other features including easy integration with custom hardware and support for TensorFlow lite and AutoML vision edge among others.

According to Google, all three products (and others under development) will be showcased at the CES 2020 in Las Vegas. The Coral Accelerator Module will be showcased at their booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Tech East, Central Plaza, CP-18, while the Coral Dev Mini will be at the MediaTek showcase located in the Venetian, Tech West, Level 3, and the new Coral SOM alongside several other new SOC and MCU explorations will be showcased at the NXP pavilion at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Tech East, Central Plaza, CP-18.

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