Sipeed MAIX: AI at the edge
AI is pervasive today, from consumer to enterprise applications. With the explosive growth of connected devices, combined with a demand for privacy/confidentiality, low latency, and bandwidth constraints, AI models trained in the cloud increasingly need to be run at the edge.
MAIX is Sipeed’s purpose-built module designed to run AI at the edge, we called it AIoT. It delivers high performance in a small physical and power footprint, enabling the deployment of high-accuracy AI at the edge, and the competitive price makes it possible to embed on any IoT device. As you see, Sipeed MAIX is quite like Google edge TPU, but it acts as a master controller, not an accelerator like edge TPU, so it is more low cost and low power than the AP+edge TPU solution.
Advantage & Usage
MAIX is not only hardware but also provides an end-to-end, hardware + software infrastructure for facilitating the deployment of customers' AI-based solutions.
Thanks to its performance, small footprint, low power, and low cost, MAIX enables the broad deployment of high-quality AI at the edge.
MAIX isn't just a hardware solution, it combines custom hardware, open software, and state-of-the-art AI algorithms to provide high-quality, easy-to-deploy AI solutions for the edge.
MAIX can be used for a growing number of industrial use cases such as predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, machine vision, robotics, voice recognition, and many more. It can be used in manufacturing, on-premise, healthcare, retail, smart spaces, transportation, etc.
CPU
In hardware, MAIX has the powerful KPU K210 inside, it offers many exciting features:
- 1st competitive RISC-V chip, also 1st competitive AI chip, newly released in Sep. 2018
- 28nm process, dual-core RISC-V 64bit IMAFDC, on-chip huge 8MB high-speed SRAM (not for XMR :D), 400MHz frequency (able to 800MHz)
- KPU (Neural Network Processor) inside, 64 KPU which is 576bit width, supports convolution kernels, any form of the activation function. It offers 0.25TOPS@0.3W,400MHz, when overclocking to 800MHz, it offers 0.5TOPS. It means you can do object recognition 60fps@VGA
- APU (Audio Processor) inside, support 8mics, up to 192KHz sample rate, hardcore FFT unit inside, easy to make a Mic Array (MAIX offers it too)
- Flexible FPIOA (Field Programmable IO Array), you can map 255 functions to all 48 GPIOs on the chip
- DVP camera and MCU LCD interface, you can connect a DVP camera, run your algorithm, and display it on an LCD
- Many other accelerators and peripherals: AES Accelerator, SHA256 Accelerator, FFT Accelerator (not APU's one), OTP, UART, WDT, IIC, SPI, I2S, TIMER, RTC, PWM, etc.
Module
Inherit the advantage of K210's small footprint, Sipeed MAIX-I module, or called M1, integrate K210, 3-channel DC-DC power, 8MB/16MB/128MB Flash (M1w module add wifi chip esp8285 on it) into Square Inch Module. All usable IO breaks out as 1.27mm(50mil) pins, and the pin's voltage is selectable from 3.3V and 1.8V.
MAIX's development board (M1 dock & M1w dock, w means WiFi version)
Firstly, We make a prototype development board for M1, called M1 dock or Dan Dock, it is simple, small, and cheap, but all functions include.
Software
MAIX supports the original standalone SDK, and FreeRTOS SDK based on C/C++.
And we port micropython on it: http://en.maixpy.sipeed.com/. It supports FPIOA, GPIO, TIMER, PWM, Flash, OV2640, LCD, etc. And it has zmodem, vi, and SPIFFS on it, you can edit python directly or sz/rz file to the board. We are glad to see you contribute to it:
https://github.com/sipeed/MaixPy //Maixpy project
https://github.com/sipeed/MaixPy_Doc_Us_En_Backup //Maixpy wiki project
Deep learning
MAIX supports the fixed-point model that the mainstream training framework trains, according to specific restriction rules, and have a model compiler to compile models to its own model format.
It supports tiny-Yolo, mobile net-v1, and, TensorFlow Lite! Many TensorFlow Lite models can be compiled and run on MAIX! And We will soon release a model shop, you can trade your model on it.