Toybrick RK1808 AI USB Compute Stick for Deep Learning, up to 3 TOPs powered by Rockchip NPU

Description

Toybrick RK1808 AI USB Compute Stick is a high-performance and low-power consumption USB accelerator designed for Deep Learning. It is equipped with Rockchip RK1808 Neural Processing Unit (NPU) features an accelerator delivering up to 3.0 TOPS and is coupled with two low-power Arm Cortex-A35 cores allowing it to run Linux. RK1808 AI USB computing stick can be used for AI inference, and also supports custom development for any specific AI application. How is the performance? So that’s roughly equivalent to the Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ X said 4 TOPs. The stick also comes with 1GB of LPDDR memory, and onboard 8GB of EMMC storage when you connect to a host computer. 

Features

• Powerful AI computing power: built-in RK1808 NPU up to 3 TOPS, dual-core Cortex-A35 architecture.
• Strong compatibility: host server supports Windows, Linux, macOS, and Arm Linux. 
• Prepare for AI developers: RKNN toolkit offers development support in both C++ and Python. Model conversion supports mainstream frameworks including PyTorch, TensorFlow,Caffe, MXNet 
• Scalability: supports multiple stick overlays on the same platform to increase host performance.
• Built-in storage, use as a USB disk with the documentation and software tools stored on the stick itself.

Work as an AI accelerator

You’ll need to install the RK1808 compute stick on another Ubuntu 16.04/x86_64 PC if you want to convert your models to use on the Arm device like Raspberry Pi.

RKNN-Toolkit is an SDK for model conversion, inference, and performance evaluation

The host computer transmits the model and pre-processed data to the RK1808 artificial intelligence computing stick through RKNN-Toolkit, and the RK1808 artificial intelligence computing stick completes the inference and returns the results to the host computer, and the host computer performs post-processing and display operations. 

The following platforms and systems are supported as host machines:

• At least Ubuntu 16.04/x86_64 PC or higher, Windows, Mac OS
• RK3399, RK3399Pro, Android system

The overall data flow diagram is as follows:

Connecting the RK1808 USB Stick to a Host Computer

The rknn-toolkit is already installed inside the RK1808 AI computing stick by default. The host computer does not need to install rknn-toolkit and rknn-api. The host computer only needs to connect to the computing stick through the USB port. Input data (such as images and video streams), the RK1808 artificial intelligence computing stick automatically completes the pre-processing, inference, and post-processing of the data, and then outputs the processing results to the host computer through the USB port. 

The host computer here can be any platform with a USB interface and any operating system, including X86/X64/Arm32/Arm64, Linux/Windows/Mac OS and Raspberry Pi, etc…