BeagleBoard puts 4Top/s AI processor in Raspberry Pi form factor

The BeagleBoard organisation has introduced a 4Top/s-capable AI processor in Raspberry Pi form factor, built around a Texas Instruments AM67A vision processor.

Called a link to suitable Debian XFCE Linux distribution, it “AM67A features a quad-core 64bit Arm CPU subsystem, two general-purpose DSPs and matrix-multiply-accelerators, GPU, vision and deep learning accelerators, and multiple Arm Cortex-R5 cores for low-latency GPIO control”, said BeagleBoard. “Users can maximise these compute capabilities with PCIe, USB3 and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, along with multiple capture and display connectivity options.”

The quad Arm cores are 1.4GHz Cortex-A53, and it is the matrix multiply accelerator that offers 4Top/s. The DSPs are Ti’s C7x.

The board has 4Gbyte of LPDDR4, a microSD card socket, 802.11ax Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.4, MIPI-DSI with touchscreen support (multiplexed with MIPI-CSI). MicroHDMI is provided for the main display.

The hardware design is open-source (although the name is copyright and its use requires payment) and available through GitHub – find links to that and a link to a suitable Debian XFCE Linux distribution on the BeagleY-AI product page can be found here.