
Edge TPU: Hands-On with Google’s Coral USB Accelerator - rdeepc
https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/edge-tpu-google-coral-usb-accelerator-cf0d79c7ec56
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jwr
The Edge TPU looks like a cool toy. But I would never base a product on
anything that Google makes (either hardware or software). It's here today, and
might not be here tomorrow, at Google's whim. I think the value of Edge TPU is
mostly educational.

And before someone waters this down with "but every company has whims and
every company can discontinue products" — in electronics, companies will
guarantee 10-15 year lifetimes, especially for automotive-grade parts, with
end-of-life buy notices well ahead of sunsetting.

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noir_lord
Even Raspberry Pi which started off as specifically educational does 5 year
release cycles on their CM (Compute Modules) which is why companies like NEC
use them in their solutions.

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jwr
Yes — and I have actually designed a product that used an RPi Compute Module,
checking their lifetime promises first.

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sdenton4
(To be clear, the edge USB device works with the raspberry pi, but throughput
is limited to USB 2.0 speeds... Because that's the speed of rpi USB ports.
It's not clear to me what the author is asking for wrt full support for the
pi.)

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austin_kodra
Thanks for pointing this out. The wording there didn't quite capture what it
was supposed to. We've gone back and adjusted the language to reflect this (I
helped edit this post with the OA).

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cameldrv
The biggest problem is that they provide no specs whatsoever and you have to
use their cloud compiler for your models. Even if you stockpile the hardware,
if Google gets bored and shuts down the service, you can’t train anymore.
Google also gets to see every model you ever deploy to the thing.

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rdeepc
That is a big problem, for now, hope there will a converter script in the
stable release

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snops
A benchmark test against Nvidia Jetson would be very interesting, especially
if it compared power consumption as well.

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rdeepc
There will be a comparison with Intel NCS

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nmstoker
Here's a video I made of one of the included demos on RPi:
[https://youtu.be/6uQlCiAGWzc](https://youtu.be/6uQlCiAGWzc)

I didn't yet succeed in converting the installation script so it would run on
Arch (unsupported) but I'll try again over the weekend.

The support team have been responsive on a number of questions too. When they
open up the range of models that can be run, it'll be a huge boost.

~~~
nmstoker
A curious detail I noticed:

the USB Id of the Coral Accelerator is for Global Unichip Corp, who are a
fabless ASIC design service company (according to their Wikipedia page). I had
been expecting it to be Google obviously.

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londons_explore
That surprises me too - it's very unlike Google to contract out tech like
this.

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snops
Given how the SOM version connects over PCI-E, maybe it is a USB3.0 to PCI-E
bridge?

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aloer
Are there comparisons between this and the google AIY vision kit with their
vision bonnet?

I’d assume it was developed at google by the same team

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rdeepc
There will be a comparison with Intel NCS

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gok
Hm but is it fast?

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rdeepc
Its faster than any other products of its kind

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sliken
I've love to see some performance comparison for the Google Edge TPU, the
Intel USB widget, and anything else in that price bracket.

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rdeepc
I have Edge TPU, Intel NCS, and vision kit hope to make a comparison among
them

