Coral is Google’s quiet initiative to enable AI without the cloud
2Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/14/21065141/google-coral-ai-edge-computing-products-applications-cloud
Reported today in The Verge.
Coral is Google's quiet initiative to enable AI without the cloud
AI allows machines to carry out all sorts of tasks that used to be the domain of humans alone. Need to run quality control on a factory production line? Set up an AI-powered camera to spot defects. How about interpreting medical data? Machine learning can identify potential tumors from scans and flag them to a doctor.
But applications like this are useful only so long as they're fast and secure. An AI camera that takes minutes to process images isn't much use in a factory, and no patient wants to risk the exposure of their medical data if it's sent to the cloud for analysis.
These are the sorts of problems Google is trying to solve through a little-known initiative called Coral.
"Traditionally, data from [AI] devices was sent to large compute instances, housed in centralized data centers where machine learning models could operate at speed," Vikram Tank, product manager at Coral, explained to The Verge over email. "Coral is a platform of hardware and software components from Google that help you build devices with local AI - providing hardware acceleration for neural networks ... right on the edge device."
You might not have heard of Coral before (it only "graduated" out of beta last October), but it's part of a fast-growing AI sector. Market analysts predict that more than 750 million edge AI chips and computers will be sold in 2020, rising to 1.5 billion by 2024. And while most of these will be installed in consumer devices like phones, a great deal are destined for enterprise customers in industries like automotive and health care.
To meet customers' needs Coral offers two main types of products: accelerators and dev boards meant for prototyping new ideas, and modules th