Why did Google kill the Coral TPU?

5 points·daly··7 comments

Their argument for creating the chip is that AI will move to the edge and that edge computing will see a 150% growth.

I've been trying to find these devices, in particular, the camera and their PCIe card. There doesn't seem to be a single device anywhere.

The device was introduced in 2019 so it's not very old. Nothing seems to have replaced it.

View on HN

Damn I was about to get one (have been thinking about PCIe accelerators) a few months ago. It sucks that we now have to predict future company decisions before buying their products, the only good side effect is more people will build instead of buy. But it's terribly inconvenient.

Probably because there is no worthwhile business model. Selling single chips doesn’t work. And they tried bundling with cloud services to get it and that probably didn’t work. And by “work” I mean: Generate the levels of business required for Google cloud to care.

Looks like they were sold to Asus https://developers.googleblog.com/2022/05/coral-googles-plat...

I think ASUS are the manufacturers and distributors, not the owners. Google still owns Coral, they just sub the production out to a third party.

You could use an NVIDIA Jetson (it is a lot heavier but close).

Intel had the Movidius stick and the openvino platform. Not sure I have seen anything recent there as well.

CES is coming up .. maybe we'll see something new. It is a hard business to crap this Edge stuff.

I bought one from Amazon a few months ago, turned up pretty quickly. Camera was available as well.

You're having issues likely due to the "chip shortage" or whatever they're calling it these days.

Products here: https://coral.ai/products/#prototyping-products

Reply on news.ycombinator.com