Maybe it's not the chip that it's too cheap. Maybe it's the coffee that's too expensive.

Ha, well, there is a disturbing reason why computer vision with ultra-cheap hardware is possible: countries all over the world are buying these by the billions in order to keep an eye on their citizens :-(

Big brother is enabling incredible economies of scale....

https://edgeimpulse.com/ai-practitioners

We work directly with vendors to perform low level optimization of deep learning, computer vision, and DSP workloads for dozens of architectures of microcontrollers and CPUs, plus exotic accelerators (neuromorphic compute!) and edge GPUs. This includes ESP32:

https://docs.edgeimpulse.com/docs/edge-ai-hardware/mcu/espre...

You can upload a TensorFlow, PyTorch, or JAX model and receive an optimized C++ library direct from your notebook in a couple lines of Python. It's honestly pretty amazing.

And we also have a full Studio for training models, including architectures we've designed specifically to run well on various embedded hardware, plus hardware-aware hyperparameter optimization that will find the best model to fit your target device (in terms of latency and memory use).

Previously you needed a crazy mixture of ML knowledge and low-level embedded engineering skills even to get started, which is not a common occurrence!

micropython seems pretty accessible from first glance. would it be easy to create a webassembly port of its code?

> In the end, I was able to improve the throughput of the FAST feature detector by about 220%, from 5.1MP/s to 11.2MP/s in my testing. This is well within the acceptable range of performance for realtime computer vision tasks, enabling the ESP32-S3 to easily process a 30fps VGA stream.

What are some use cases for FAST?

Features from accelerated segment test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_from_accelerated_segm...

Is there TPU-like functionality in anything in this price range of chips yet?

Neon is an optional SIMD instruction set extension for ARMv7 and ARMv8; so Pi Zero and larger have SIMD extensions

Orrin Nano have 40 TOPS, which is sufficient for Copilot+ AFAIU. "A PCIe Coral TPU Finally Works on Raspberry Pi 5" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310063

From https://phys.org/news/2024-06-infrared-visible-device-2d-mat... :

> Using this method, they were able to up-convert infrared light of wavelength around 1550 nm to 622 nm visible light. The output light wave can be detected using traditional silicon-based cameras.

> "This process is coherent—the properties of the input beam are preserved at the output. This means that if one imprints a particular pattern in the input infrared frequency, it automatically gets transferred to the new output frequency," explains Varun Raghunathan, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering (ECE) and corresponding author of the study published in Laser & Photonics Reviews.

"Show HN: PicoVGA Library – VGA/TV Display on Raspberry Pi Pico" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35117847#35120403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40275530

"Designing a SIMD Algorithm from Scratch" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38450374

> What are some use cases for FAST?

The FAST feature detector is an algorithm for finding regions of an image that are visually distinctive, which can be used as a first step in motion tracking and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) algorithms typically seen in XR, robotics, etc.

> Is there TPU-like functionality in anything in this price range of chips yet?

I think that in the case of the ESP32-S3, its SIMD instructions are designed to accelerate the inference of quantized AI models (see: https://github.com/espressif/esp-dl), and also some signal processing like FFTs. I guess you could call the SIMD instructions TPU-like, in the sense that the chip has specific instructions that facilitates ML inference (EE.VRELU.Sx performs the ReLU operation). Using these instructions will still take away CPU time where TPUs are typically their own processing core, operating asynchronously. I’d say this is closer to ARM NEON.

Is that related to ‘Energy Function’ in any way?

(I ask because a long time ago I was involved in an Automated Numberplate Reading startup that was using an FPGA to quickly find the vehicle numberplate in an image)

FAST is an algorithm for efficiently looking for "interesting" parts (basically, corners) of an image, so you can safely (in theory) ignore the rest of it. The output from a feature detector may end up contributing to an energy function later, directly or indirectly.

Kendryte K210 supports 1x1 and 3x3 convolutions on the "TPU". It was pretty well supported in terms of software & documentation but sadly it hasn't become popular.

These days, you can easily find cheap RV1103 ("LuckFox"), BL808 ("Ox64/Pine64") and CV1800B/SG20002 ("MilkV") based dev boards, all of which have some sort of basic TPU. Unfortunately, they are designed to be linux boards meaning that all TPU related stuff is extremely abstracted with zero under-the-hood documentation. So it's absolutely unclear whether their TPUs are real or faked with clever code optimizations.

They all have TPU in hardware, my team has been verifying and benchmarking them. Documentation is only available for the high-level C APIs to the libraries that a programmer is expected to use, and even that tends to be extremely lacking.

Like the other commenter said, there's plenty of support for SIMD and asm in Rust.

You might ask around on a Rust embedded or Rust ESP32 chatroom before making the dive.

If you are on Windows, you will need to place the project folder at the top level drive directory, and there are other quirks as well, but it works.

I think the comment you're referring to is talking about the architecture in general, but not the silicon we're discussing here.

It is doubtful that ESP32's Xtensa is VLIW-capable, though. Presumably their compiler would emit FLIX instructions if it were.

And the price, size and power consumption are also quite a bit higher but it will certainly grant a better general compute environment, if you want to run Linux or smth.