Indian reconfigurable computing specialist Vicharak is making ready to launch a crowdfunding marketing campaign for a single-board laptop designed to ship acceleration on the edge — by combining a six-core Arm-based CPU and a 112k-cell field-programmable gate array (FPGA): the Vaaman.
“Vaaman stands on the forefront of edge AI and ML [Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning] acceleration, offering a dynamic platform for groundbreaking purposes,” Vicharak’s Akshar Vastarpara writes of the corporate’s design. “We’re at present creating a customized platform referred to as ‘Gati,’ which is able to allow customized end-to-end options, and allow convolutional neural networks (CNN) completely on Vaaman. By mapping these superior algorithms to the FPGA, the CPU is left free to deal with different vital duties, which improves total efficiency.”
The Vaaman seems to be to supply a place to begin for energy-efficient on-device AI and ML workloads, in an open-hardware package deal. (📷: Vicharak)
The Vaaman board is powered by a Rockchip RK3399 system-on-chip, which has two high-performance Arm Cortex-A72 cores working at as much as 2GHz and 4 lower-power Cortex-A53 cores working at as much as 1.5GHz plus an Arm Mali-T864 graphics processor. To this, Vicharak has added a alternative of 2GB or 4GB of LPDDR4 reminiscence and an Efinix Trion T120 FPGA — providing 112,128 logic parts, 5,407kB of embedded reminiscence in 1,056 blocks, 320 18×18 multipliers, and both 512MB of 1GB of devoted DDR3L reminiscence.
The only-board laptop itself boasts gigabit Ethernet connectivity, two USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0 port, a micro-HDMI video output with as much as 4k60 show assist plus a MIPI Show Serial Interface (DSI) port, a USB Kind-C connector with DisplayPort alternate mode once more supporting a 4k60 show, a two-lane MIPI Digicam Serial Interface (CSI) connector, and a 3.5mm analog audio jack with mic enter. There’s on-board dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0, 64GB of eMMC storage plus microSD growth, and a four-lane PCI Specific Gen. 2.1 port.
The board is designed primarily for AI and ML workloads, accelerating neural community efficiency on the FPGA. (📷: Vicharak)
For experimenting with electronics there is a pair of 40-pin general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) headers, one every for the RK3399 and the FPGA, offering buses together with one UART, two SPI, one I2C, one I2S, and one S/PDIF, together with one pulse-width modulation (PWM) and one analog to digital converter (ADC) channels. The board itself, Vicharak guarantees, shall be open supply — although the schematics will solely be launched after completion of the crowdfunding marketing campaign and supply of {hardware} to backers.
Extra data on the Vaaman is offered on the Vicharak web site; events can join on Crowd Provide to be notified when the marketing campaign goes dwell.