Low-Power IoT App Processor Enables AI At The Edge

GreenWaves Technologies’ GAP8 IoT application processor enables the cost-effective development, deployment and autonomous operation of intelligent sensing devices that capture, analyze, classify and act on the fusion of rich data sources such as images, sounds or vibrations. GAP8 is uniquely optimized to execute a large spectrum of image and audio algorithms including convolutional neural network (CNN) inference, with extreme energy efficiency, thanks to an integrated 8-core computational cluster combined with a convolution hardware accelerator. A separate core, within an independent voltage and frequency domain, takes care of communication, control and information pre-analysis. This allows industrial and consumer product manufacturers to integrate artificial intelligence and advanced classification into new classes of wireless sensing devices for IoT applications including image recognition, counting people and objects, machine health monitoring, home security, speech recognition, consumer robotics, wearables and smart toys.

 

GAP8 use cases:

  • Always-on face detection with a few mWs of power
  • Indoor people counting / presence detection with years of autonomy
  • Sub $15 machine vision and voice control solutions for consumer robotics
  • Single chip processing for four microphone voice capture and 10-word speaker independent keyword spotting  

For most developers, GAP8 is programmed just like any MCU. When compute-intense tasks need to be launched they are off-loaded to the cluster through the APIs of a rich compute library included in the GAP8 SDK. A well guided, tool-driven methodology also allows trained CNNs described with an AI framework to be optimized for and ported onto GAP8.

 

More info is readily available for the GAP8 and its Software Development Kit.