Banana Pi Targets Compact, Power-Environment friendly Edge AI with the RISC-V-Powered BPI-K230D Zero

Banana Pi has introduced a brand new Raspberry Pi Zero-footprint single-board pc, designed particularly for low-power machine studying and synthetic intelligence on the edge and supporting as much as two digital camera modules: the BPI-CanMV-K230D-Zero, or BPI-K230D Zero for brief.

“Banana Pi BPI-CanMV-K230D-Zero [is an] AIoT [Artificial Intelligence of Things] SBC [Single-Board Computer] design with Canaan K230D RISC-V chip,” Banana Pi explains of its newest {hardware} unveiling. “This board is designed be Canaan Expertise and Banana Pi[‘s offering to the] open supply {hardware} group, that includes with the superior Kendryte K230D chip.”

The BPI-K230D Zero, dropped at our consideration by Linux Gizmos, is constructed round Caanan’s Kendryte K230D system-on-chip, which incorporates two 64-bit T-Head XuanTie C908 RISC-V cores — one working at 1.6GHz and with the RISC-V Vector Extensions (RVV) 1.0, and one working at 800MHz and with out RVV help. Alongside these cores is a third-generation proprietary Kendryte Processing Unit (KPU) coprocessor, designed to speed up on-device machine studying and synthetic intelligence workloads — and whereas the corporate has not shared its anticipated efficiency in operations-per-second, it claims it might hit 38 frames per second (FPS) working the YoloV5S mannequin, 85 FPS for Resnet 50, and 670 FPS for Mobilenet V2.

The chip additionally features a “3D structured mild depth engine” and a imaginative and prescient processing unit help H.264/H.265 {hardware} encode and decode, designed to be used with the two-lane and four-lane MIPI Digicam Serial Interface (CSI) ports. There is a MIPI Show Serial Interface (DSI) output for a show, working as much as 1080p, on-board 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, a single USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) port for enlargement, an a Raspberry Pi-style 40-pin general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header. Oddly, Banana Pi has opted to place solely 128MB of LPDDR4 reminiscence on the board — a call that’s defined away by the corporate’s plan to advertise the board for MicroPython use, quite than as a Linux system.

“Two totally different firmware variations are deliberate,” the corporate explains. “One for Linux and the opposite for CanMV MicroPython. Amongst them, MicroPython is the software program broadly utilized by the present [Canaan] K230 customers as a result of MicroPython is easy to make use of.”

Banana Pi is displaying the Raspberry Pi Zero footprint a whole lot of love of late: final month the corporate unveiled the BPI-M4 Zero, a compact board based mostly on the identical {hardware} because the BPI-M4 and designed as a successor to the BPI-M2 Zero. With an Allwinner H618 quad-core system-on-chip at its coronary heart, the BPI-M4 Zero makes use of the proprietary Arm Cortex-A54 processor structure the place the brand new mannequin makes use of RISC-V cores — and there is no coprocessor for ML and AI acceleration.

Extra info is accessible on the Banana Pi discussion board and the official product web page; pricing and availability have but to be confirmed.