As AI accelerators are becoming increasingly important amid growing demand for AI, Hailo Technologies is expanding its line of AI acceleration processors to make them appealing for a broader range of customers with a wider variety of applications.
The company is adding to its Hailo-8 series of AI acceleration products with the introduction of the Hailo-8L processor and the Hailo-8 Century PCIe card.
The move will help Hailo target the need of more companies as the generative AI explosion continues to create new demand.
The company told Fierce Electronics via email, “The recent buzz around generative AI and its mass market accessibility has further fueled the growing interest in AI across a multitude of industries and markets. With real-time, accurate insights, AI has the potential to transform businesses of all sizes and vertical markets, ranging from leading industrial automation manufacturers and retail chains to security and surveillance system providers for smart transportation, smart cities, and more.”
Hailo described the Hailo-8L as “competitively priced” for “entry level” applications, which despite what the language suggests still translates to an ability to perform trillions of operations per second on AI applications with lower capacity or performance requirements. In this case, the 8L runs up to 13 TOPS.
What constitutes an application with low-end requirements? Maybe something like people detection with just enough AI processing to help identify shoplifters in a grocery store, for example.
By expanding its efforts to support these applications, Hailo also is looking to address how AI applications may evolve in the future. “These applications could be in surveillance, smart cities, and smart retail, identifying shoplifters in grocery shops for example, to name a few,” the company said. “Lower-end use cases don’t need 26 TOPS of compute power at the moment, but in a few years’ time, customers will likely demand more insights and more analytics, such as multiple tasks on the same stream, more complex tasks, or higher resolution video.”
The Hailo-8 Century line PCIe cards deliver 52 to 208 TOPS, enabling demanding applications such as video management systems handling a large number of video streams, Hailo said. The cards’ power efficiency rates at 400 FPS per watt on the ResNet50 benchmark model, the company added, while offering great cost efficiency starting at $249 for the 52 TOPS card, representing up to 70% reduction in edge AI deployment costs.
The Hailo-8 expansion follows Hailo’s unveiling of the Hailo-15 vision processor units earlier this year to support greater performance in cameras for enhancement of both video quality and video analytics.