ASUS & Google Team Up for ‘Tinker Board’ AI-Focused Credit-Card Sized Computers
by Anton Shilov on November 12, 2019 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- AI
- Asus
- Tinker Board
ASUS and Google have joined forces to develop a new project that the companies are calling ‘Tinker Board’ single board computers (SBCs). With a footprint not much larger than a credit card, the systems are designed for building small systems to work on AI inference applications like image recognition.
The systems in question are the Tinker Edge T and Tinker Edge R. The former is based on the NXP i.MX8M with an Edge TPU chip that accelerates TensorFlow Lite, whereas the Tinker Edge R is powered by the Rockchip RK3399 Pro processor with an NPU for 4K machine learning. The SBCs officially support Android and Debian operating system, though nothing prevents them from running Linux or other OSes.
Both Tinker Edge T and Tinker Edge R computers feature active cooling as well as mainstream I/O interfaces, including GbE, USB 3.0, and HDMI.
ASUS and Google position their Tinker Edge T and Tinker Edge R for various edge AI applications that have to be compact and very energy efficient.
ASUS plans to demonstrate its Tinker Edge T and Tinker Edge R SBCs at the IoT Technology 2019 conference in Japan, which kicks off on November 20. Pricing of the devices remains to be seen, but it will depend on volumes and other factors.
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mode_13h - Friday, November 15, 2019 - link
At that point, why not just step up to Nvidia's Xavier NX?olafgarten - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
I don't think they will charge that much, the Tinker Edge T is almost identical to the current Coral Edge TPU dev board and that is only $150.The R can't really be more expensive
kirsch - Tuesday, November 12, 2019 - link
“ The SBCs officially support Android and Debian operating system, though nothing prevents them from running Linux or other OSes.”Debian is a Linux distribution.
Memo.Ray - Tuesday, November 12, 2019 - link
Not only Debian is a linux distribution, Android has a linux kernel, so it is kind of a linux distribution minus GNU.PeachNCream - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
One can't reasonably expect journalists to understand technology even if they do occasionally make a laughably uninformed statement like that one.artifex - Tuesday, November 12, 2019 - link
The Edge T and Edge R boards were shown at Computex, at the end of May.mobutu - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
oh look active cooling for thesewhat a bummer
nandnandnand - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
If it's close to silent, does it matter?willis936 - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
Show me a quiet 20mm fan.mode_13h - Friday, November 15, 2019 - link
Dust is one issue. Also, as bearings wear, you have more potential for noise and another point of failure.