Libre Computer Targets Edge AI and Computer Vision with Alta, Its Latest Cottonwood SBC
With a six-core high-performance processor and a 5 TOPS NPU, Libre Computer's latest board wants to power your edge AI projects.
UPDATE (11/1/2023): Libre Computer has opened pre-orders for its new Alta ALM-A311D-CC "Cottonwood" single-board computer, offering the 4GB variant for $60 with shipping scheduled to begin on November 24th.
The pricing represents a considerable discount over the $125 at which pre-production samples had previous been listed for sale, and puts it at a competitive price-point against rival devices like the recently-launched Raspberry Pi 5 — offering a lower-performance CPU but with the benefit of a dedicated neural network coprocessor for machine learning and on-device artificial intelligence workloads.
More details, and the link to order, are available on the LoveRPi store.
Original article continues below.
Libre Computer has announced a new entry in its Cottonwood family of single-board computers, aimed at edge AI and machine learning workloads and boasting a 1W idle power consumption: the Libre computer AML-A311D-CC Alta.
"[The] Libre Computer AML-A311D-CC Alta, part of our Cottonwood family, is our latest performant AI-enabled single board computer designed for compute-intensive applications," the company claims of its latest board design. "With upstream AI and neuro-computing support, this board brings advanced hardware acceleration for the perfect mix of general purpose and specialized computing."
The Alta is built around the Amlogic A311D system-on-chip, with four high-performance Arm Cortex-A73 cores running at up to 2.21GHz and two low-power Cortex-A53 cores running at up to 1.8GHz. The chip also includes an Arm Mali-G52MP4 graphics processor, a neural network coprocessor with a claimed five tera-operations per second (TOPS) of INT8 compute, and has been paired to up to 4GB of LPDDR4X memory.
Elsewhere on the board, which roughly mimics the footprint of a Raspberry Pi, is a USB Type-C connector for power and data, a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, a full-size HDMI 2.1 connector, a 3.5mm jack with analog audio and video, gigabit Ethernet with Wake-on-Lan (WOL) support, four USB 3.0 ports, a Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) connector, an infrared receiver, a four-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) connector and a four-lane Camera Serial Interface connector, and a microSD slot for storage.
"New to the Cottonwood family are [the] MIPI CSI and DSI connectors not found on the Potato family," Libre Computer explains. "[The] MIPI connectors follow the 22-pin layout found on the Raspberry Pi Zero W and Compute Module Base IO board for re-use with existing cameras and displays. Combined with the 5+TOPs NPU, Alta is ideal for real-time 4k+ video footage object detection and other modern AI workloads."
The announcement of the Alta comes hot on the heels of Libre Computer' refresh of the Le Potato family, launching a new variant dubbed the Sweet Potato which offers an internal USB header and Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) support. While both the Sweet Potato and Alta are designed with 4k media in mind, though, the Alta offers considerably more performance thanks to its six-core system-on-chip and neural network coprocessor.
More information on the Alta is available on the Libre Computer forum; pricing has not yet been confirmed, though pre-production samples were listed on the LoveRPi website at $125.
