New standards for AI inference with new accelerators

Rutronik has recently added Axelera AI, a European pioneer in AI and edge computing, to its franchise partners. Axelera Metis products provide a compelling alternative to conventional GPU-based solutions, combining high performance, efficiency, and ease of integration. The Metis AI platform is a holistic AI solution that combines state-of-the-art hardware and software. The hardware portfolio comprises the Metis M.2 AI Inference Acceleration Card and the Metis PCIe AI Inference Acceleration Card

At the heart of the platform is the Metis AIPU, a quad-core chip based on a proprietary RISC-V architecture and D-IMC. This architecture allows AI inference performance of up to 214 TOPS with energy efficiency of 15 TOPS/W. This makes it excellent for computer vision inference on the edge and supplies scalable technology to meet the future demands of AI acceleration workloads.

The hardware is complemented by the Voyager SDK, a comprehensive software package that simplifies model deployment, optimisation and integration. Developers can get started right away, regardless of whether they work with TensorFlow, PyTorch, or ONNX.

The Metis M.2 AI Inference Acceleration Card, powered by the Metis AIPU, is perfect for applications with limited space that require powerful AI inference. In addition, the M.2 card has 1GB of dedicated DRAM memory, which helps lower power consumption and allows easier integration into systems. Its inference performance is up to 214 TOPS with 5W to 9W typical application performance. A PCIe Gen3 x4 interface and security features (Secure Boot, Root of Trust) round out the product. This card is optionally available with an active cooling solution.

Target applications:

• Surveillance: easy deployment in buildings, construction sites or event venues
• Robotics: high-resolution advanced gesture recognition, pose estimation and decoding of human intentions
• Medical: improved accuracy of real-time diagnosis, monitoring, imaging and analysis
• Agritech: crop analysis, smart irrigation, pest control, automated harvesting
• Drones: navigation, object detection and monitoring in lightweight, battery-powered UAV systems

The Metis PCIe AI Inference Acceleration Card offers even more performance, making it the most powerful AI accelerator PCIe card on the market for edge AI applications. The PCIe single slot cards in HHHL form factor with PCIe Gen3 x4 interface are also powered by the Metis AIPU. The PCIe version features up to 3,200 FPS for ResNet-50, up to 214 TOPS with typical application performance of 8W to 15W, and active air cooling. Security features such as Secure Boot and Root of Trust are also incorporated. It is available with 4GB and 16GB memory configurations.

Further options with four Metis chips will be available soon, enabling up to 856 TOPS. These will then be supplied with 16GB and 64GB memory.

Target applications:

• Security: faster detection of incidents such as break-ins, falls or abandoned luggage
• Industry 4.0: fault detection, quality control, occupational safety
• Retail: customer behaviour, inventory monitoring, automated checkout systems
• Mobility: toll collection, enforcement and parking management
• Logistics: improving operational efficiency and safety in logistics centres

Both products support simultaneous inference on multiple cameras and allow the parallel use of independent neural networks. They deliver a wide range of end-to-end AI pipelines and pre-trained models for various applications. Advanced quantisation tools also ensure high prediction accuracy without compromising performance.