As pioneers in the Arm micro server ecosystem, miniNodes has been an innovator and leading expert in the use of small devices to fulfill compute capacity at the Edge, watched as IoT has matured and impacted all industries, and is now witnessing AI and Machine Learning depart the Cloud and instead be performed on-device or at the Edge of the network. More and more phones, home assistant devices (such as Echo), and even laptops are including custom AI hardware accelerator chips designed to handle voice recognition, gesture and motion control, object detection, analyze video and camera feeds, and perform many other deep learning tasks.
The AI models and algorithms that make this happen have to be trained and tested on specialized hardware accelerators as well, and historically that has been very expensive to perform in the cloud. miniNodes is taking a different approach however, and pairing custom hardware AI Accelerators with cost effective Raspberry Pi 4 servers, to lower the cost of testing and training these models while still maintaining high levels of performance. Deep learning, neural network, and matrix multiplication activities can be offloaded to the AI hardware, rapidly accelerating the model training.
The first product to launch in the new miniNodes AI Server lineup is a Raspberry Pi 4 server combined with a Gyrfalcon 2801 NPU, for a maximum of 5.6 TOP/s of dedicated AI processing power. In the future, we will expand the lineup to include Google Coral and Intel Movidius hardware as well.
The Raspberry Pi has always been one of the most popular hosted Arm Servers at miniNodes, even as far back as the original Raspberry Pi (1) Model B, some of which are still running! Over the years, we upgraded to Raspberry Pi 2’s, 3’s, and the 3+. So, it was only a matter of time until we deployed new, faster Raspberry Pi 4 servers.
However, with the launch of the Pi 4 and its increased capabilities, we decided it was time to upgrade our infrastructure, management, and backend systems to match. That work is actually still ongoing, but in order to start testing the ability to run AI workloads, we have made a few units available for early adopters to begin testing their ML models. If you are looking for a cost effective way to get started with AI processing or are interested in testing AI/ML on Arm cores, this is a great way to get started. Check out the new miniNodes AI Arm Server here: https://www.mininodes.com/product/raspberrypi-4-ai-server/
And if you have any questions, just drop us a note at info@mininodes.com!
[…] As you can see, our view is that the future of AI servers is based on Arm SoC’s, and now is the time to start exploring what that means for your workload. […]