The San Diego-based microelectronics startup company, Kneron, has recently released an artificial intelligence (AI) system-on-a-chip (SoC), KL720 with a multibranched market potential. The company declares that its latest chip offers greater performance than its competing products with less power consumption.
Kneron’s Latest Innovation
Kneron’s KL720 microprocessor has an unbelievable amount of power as compared to other microprocessors. The SoC is available in 9mm x 9mm companion and 11m x 11mm host configurations. It performs a total of 0.9 operations per second (TOPS) per watt. The robustness of the microprocessor is 700MHz neural processing unit (NPU), 400MHz Arm-Cortex control system, and 128MB of built-in LPDD4 RAM.
Image processing in KL720 is very fast at 4K resolution and video at the full resolution of 1080p without connecting it to any cloud server. Kneron state that the microprocessor supports 3D image sensing in order to provide smart surveillance systems with a vast and detailed observation field. Apart from this, the company claims that even highly detailed masks can not trick its chipset’s advanced facial recognition algorithms.
Overall, Kneron TOPS uses an Arm Cortex M4 as its main control unit. The average power consumption for the full package is around 1.2W. Kneron founder and CEO Albert Liu,
“KL720 microprocessor combines power with unmatched energy-efficiency and Kneron’s industry-leading Artificial Intelligence algorithms to bring a new era for smart devices”.
By the low cost of the microprocessor, even more, devices can take advantage of the benefits of edge AI, as it protects user privacy, which any existing competitors can’t match. The CEO of the company also claims that:
“In Combination with our existing KL520, we are proud to offer the most comprehensive suite of AI chips and software for devices on the market.”
Kneron considered products such as smart TVs, video game systems, connected headsets, retail kiosks, and robot vacuums as products that could benefit from its latest product. However, the organization is not just focusing on winning the business of consumer electronics manufacturers.
The startup also stated that its new microprocessor is better than Google’s Coral Edge tensor processing unit (TPU). The firm claims that the KL720’s power utilization is four times beneficial as compared to that of google’s product.
Presently, the company is supposed to be ready to send out the KL720 for manufacturer sampling within very less time. The firm hopes its AI SoC will be beneficial in power electronic devices as soon as next year. Considering the very promising nature of the product, Kneron is supposed to become 2021’s breakout chipmaker. The idea is that two or more sensors such as that of cameras, mics, thermal sensors, etc are connected together to build a private edge mesh intelligence and it doesn’t have access to the cloud to process AI models and applications.
