Banana Pi BPI-EAI80 Offers a Dual-Core CPU, 300 GOPS NPU for Edge AI Acceleration for Just $16
Low-cost all-in-one board offers touchscreen, camera, CAN, and GPIO interfaces, plus on-board Wi-Fi and microphones.
Sinovoip's Banana Pi arm, which got its start offering low-cost equivalents to the Raspberry Pi family of single-board computers, has launched its latest model: a $16 board boasting Edgeless' EAI80 microcontroller with 300 gigaoperations per second (GOPS) neural processing unit (NPU) on-board.
Designed for edge AI projects, the Banana Pi EAI80 has at its heart an Edgeless EAI80 system-on-chip (SoC), which includes a dual-core Arm Cortex-M4F primary processor running at 200MHz and a 300MHz neural processing unit (NPU) designed to accelerate convolutional neural network (CNN) workloads with up to 300 GOPS of compute performance.
The board includes 8MB of SDRAM memory, a 40-pin GPIO header, an LCD connector offering up to 1024x768 resolution, CAN bus header, two on-board microphones, and a DVP camera connector. The board is powered, meanwhile, by a USB 2.0 Type-C connector to the bottom left, with network connectivity provided by an on-board Espressif ESP8266 Wi-Fi module.
"[Edgeless] EAI series adopt 'Dual-CPU+NPU' structure, combine AI ability with real-time and low power embedded MCU," the company writes of the part powering the board. "Rich peripherals and HW-security integrated, EAI series are designed to support next-gen. IoT applications, provide single-chip turnkey solution with AI recognition and MCU control."
CNX Software, which brought our attention to the launch, has found the board on sale now on AliExpress for $16, with an all-in-one educational kit packing the board, touchscreen display, camera, and USB power supply for $80. Additional information is available on the Banana Pi wiki.
