Dev Kit Weekly: BeagleBone AI

This week we jump right into a descendant of one of the original open hardware maker pro development kits that has gotten a facelift for artificial intelligence applications – BeagleBone AI. The BeagleBone AI is a performance-packed platform is based on Texas Instruments' Sitara AM5729 SoC, which integrates so much heterogeneous compute power it's actually tucked away underneath a heatsink on the board. Dual TI C66x floating-point DSPs, four Embedded Vision Engines, a dual-core PowerVR 3D GPU, a Vivante 2D graphics accelerator, dual Arm Cortex-A15 cores, dual Arm Cortex-M4 cores, an H.264 video encode/decode subsystem, and two programmable real-time units (RTUs).Beyond just a long list of processing engines, all of that diverse compute makes the BeagleBone AI a perfect match for a wide range of neural networking applications. For instance, high-speed video interfaces on the board can be used to pipe in video streams through the encode/decode subsystem and pass them on to a CNN running on one of the DSPs or GPU. Meanwhile, code or control logic running on one of the Arm cores or PRUs could trigger an action.