SAKURA-II Brings Energy-Efficient Edge AI to Raspberry Pi 5

Specializing in energy-efficient edge AI hardware and software solutions, EdgeCortix is a Tokyo-based manufacturer of AI accelerators and platforms.

The company’s core offering is the SAKURA-II series, which leverages its proprietary Dynamic Neural Accelerator (DNA) architecture to deliver high-performance, low-latency AI inferencing for real-time applications.

In its latest move, EdgeCortix has introduced an M.2 form factor SAKURA-II AI accelerator module that is compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5 and any single-board computer (SBC) featuring an M.2 2280 slot with PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 support.

📝 SAKURA-II M.2: Key Specifications

Equipped with 60 TOPS of INT8 performance and 30 TFLOPS of BF16 compute capability, the SAKURA-II M.2 can be configured with up to 16 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and up to 68 GB/sec memory bandwidth, enabling it to handle large models and complex workloads with ease.

Thanks to its M.2 2280 form factor, it can easily connect with the Raspberry Pi 5, or to any other single-board computer or embedded system that requires low-power, high-performance AI acceleration for tasks such as real-time object detection, large language model inference, or multi-modal edge AI applications.

It’s specifically designed for space-constrained environments and to efficiently run generative AI models and workloads such as Llama 2, Stable Diffusion, DETR, and Vision Transformers, all while maintaining a power consumption figure of around 10 watts.

There's also a more powerful PCIe version of the SAKURA-II, available in single and dual chip configurations, designed for higher-throughput edge servers and industrial applications.

🛒 Getting the SAKURA-II M.2

Priced at $349, the SAKURA-II M.2 can be sourced from the official website. There is no mention whether additional shipping charges would apply, so be sure to ask about shipping fees when contacting EdgeCortix during your purchase inquiry.