Blaize offering path for upgrading edge systems with AI – without the power drain
Blaize has announced its first AI computing hardware and software products built to meet the requirements for compute and productization of AI applications at the edge. The Blaize Pathfinder and Xplorer platforms together with the Blaize AI Software Suite enable developers to usher in a new era of more practical and commercially viable edge AI products across a wide range of edge use cases and industries.
“Today’s edge solutions are either too small to compute the load or too costly and too hard to productize,” says Dinakar Munagala, co-founder and CEO, Blaize. “Blaize AI edge computing products overcome these limitations of power, complexity and cost to unleash the adoption of AI at the edge, facilitating the migration of AI computing out of the data center to the edge.”
Edge AI markets are projected to grow rapidly as demand for AI at the edge transforms entire industries and AI functionality becomes a “must-have” requirement for new products. Omdia Research projects edge chipset revenue to reach $51B in 2025.
The Blaize embedded and accelerator platforms are built on the Blaize Graph Streaming Processor (GSP) architecture designed for the demands of edge computing. With 16 GSP cores and 16TOPS of AI inference performance within a tiny 7W power envelope, GSP delivers up to 60x better system-level efficiency vs. GPU/CPUs for edge AI applications. In addition, GSP enables 50x less memory bandwidth, and 10x lower latency. Blaize GSP is a 100% programmable processor and features advanced capabilities including multi-threading and streaming.
The P1600 embedded Systems on Module (SOM) brings the programmability and efficiency benefits of the GSP to embedded edge AI applications deployed at the sensor edge, or on the network edge. No host processor is needed for the P1600.
Blaize Xplorer platforms are built to accelerate AI applications at the edge of the enterprise via easy plug-in to the PCIe slot in a host server or appliance. The X1600E is a small form factor accelerator platform for small and power-constrained environments such as convenience stores or industrial sites. This is an accelerator form factor uniquely available from Blaize due to the efficiency of the GSP – and can be added to accelerate AI apps in industrial PCs or as a rack of cards in a small 1U server.
The X1600P is a standard PCIe-based accelerator in a half-height, half-width form factor. The X1600P can replace a desktop GPU in edge servers and provide anywhere from 16-64TOPS of AI inference performance within a very low power envelope.
The Blaize AI software suite is built on open standards with ease of accessibility to liberate product developers from being locked to proprietary development environments. Comprised of the Picasso SDK, and AI Studio, a completely code-free visual interface, the software suite has tools for both traditional developers and non-coder domain experts. Additionally, both tool sets utilize Blaize Netdeploy, a Blaize innovation with edge-aware algorithms for better accuracy and performance for edge deployments.
Customer samples of both product lines are available now with full production expected starting in Q4 2020.
Article Topics
Blaize | edge AI | edge processor | GPU | IIoT | retail | Smart Industry
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