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Comment by jononor | Hacker News Reader

It seems here that Google provides the core IP, and that Synaptic packages this (and probably other related IP blocks) block that can be used to build a SoC. As of now there are no chips announced. So it will be some years before we as software/electronics engineers get to play with it.

The architecture seems to be RISC-V array with standard RVV vector instruction set. That is a quite familiar environment for software developers compared to custom systolic arrays.

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I think they announced 5 chips[0] in the SL2610 product line[1] today. It appears they're combining 1-2 ARM Cortex-A55 with a Cortex-M52 and a 1 TOPS NPU. Somewhat more complete data sheet here[2] (which is still a bit anemic, IMHO) There are photos of the devkit hardware that will be offered at [6] if you scroll up a little bit.

The original Google Coral lineup offered a 4TOPS accelerator back in 2018-2020.[3][4]

The original (4 TOPS) Coral used ~1 watt while this new Coral TPU is designed for 10mW/0.5 TOPS.[5] That power budget fits well alongside low power MCU's.

It doesn't appear to include any hardware accelerated video encoding[6] for H264/etc, which was also a massive limitation of the original google coral (improved slightly in the Dev Board Mini). There's a lot of documentation on consuming WebRTC content, and while streaming out is mentioned ... any encoding would have to be performed on one of the A55 cores at dubious performance levels. The RK3588, for example, includes a VPU for hardware accelerated video encoding (H264/HEVC encoding @ 8k30fps).

0: https://cdn.bfldr.com/ZU41R0OK/at/tjm5s8hrmz5mgqrjtsrc5c4/sl...

1: https://www.synaptics.com/products/embedded-processors/sl261...

2: https://cdn.bfldr.com/ZU41R0OK/at/ks4thp8bw9n3bt2ktms3k34s/s...

3: https://abopen.com/news/google-launches-coral-edge-tpu-devel...

4: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/new-coral-products-for-...

5: https://developers.google.com/coral/guides/power

6: https://synaptics-astra.github.io/doc/v/latest/linux/index.h...

Looking at the state of the original Coral TPU (which was basically abandoned, just like regular other Google stuff), would make me very wary to use this is a long term product.

the coral tpu does what it does and it's not bad at it. The documentation is good , and quite a few people use them practically. They're available readily.

What's upsetting about the state? Continued development?

however, to your point : being google affiliated is a huge red-flag for longevity.

They were completely sold out for 2-3 years (2020 onwards), and Google wiped documentation (https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/ redirects to the main page, which has no reference to the original Coral). I can't tell where there's an official place to buy this. I see some on Amazon, but that might be resold.

Huge amount of drivers, all for 6.12, which is already pretty old. https://github.com/synaptics-astra/linux_6_12-drivers-synapt...

Agreed that that no hardware video encode is pretty damned deflating.

Having such a low power device is incredibly enticing. Thanks for the good details. One random thing I'm kind of excited over, there's 3x I2S audio connections, which has some weird fun use cases (ideally a little field recorder?).

One curious thing, Google's post says they are still trying to finalize the matrix extensions for RISC-V. I'm assuming those simply aren't on these Synaptics chips?

Did you check out the STM32N6? It apparently has an h264 encoder

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