M5Stack has unveiled its 24 TOPS AI Pyramid Pro pyramid-shaped desktop personal computer. Apart from its novel design, this new piece of hardware is specifically designed to run artificial intelligence (AI) locally rather than in the cloud.
To this end, it can be thought of more as an “AI appliance” than a traditional PC. It’s shaped like a pyramid mostly for fun and branding, but inside it’s serious edge-AI hardware.
The device is compact and comes with 8GB RAM, strong video encode/decode, multi-camera support, rich I/O, and low-power operation. It also comes with 32GB of onboard eMMC storage, and offers dual HDMI 2.0 ports, four USB-A 3.0 ports, and two USB Type-C ports.
As for its declared computing power, 24 TOPS is pretty impressive. TOPS stands for “Trillion Operations Per Second,” which means it can perform 24 trillion AI math operations per second.
AI power in a pyramid shape
While that’s not close to gaming-PC power, it’s still very strong for on-device AI, especially at its declared price point of $250. According to reports, this new piece of kit has been designed to specialize in real-time computer vision, speech recognition, and object detection.
It is also optimized to run small to medium LLMs (quantized, not ChatGPT-scale) and multiple camera feeds at once. To condense all this into a small device, M5Stack has dispensed with including a graphical processing unit (GPU) and gone with something called Arm Central processing unit (CPU).
This is very efficient and requires very little power to function. The device also includes a purpose-built neural processor, which is fast for AI but slow for everything else.
This makes the pyramid computer fast for an AI interface, quiet, and relatively low power to run. It is not, however, good enough for gaming, heavy coding apps, or general desktop usage.
One of its standout features is its ability to allegedly decode up to sixteen 1080p video streams. This means it can simultaneously handle multiple cameras at once and analyze them at the same time.
This should mean it can readily perform detection, tracking, and face recognition. That would make it ideal for smart security systems, AI camera hubs, or as an edge gateway for factories or other buildings.
Not for the general consumer
The ability to host an AI locally (rather than on a cloud) also has some interesting benefits. It offers, for example, much improved privacy as video or audio footage captured never leaves its network.
The new computer also provides much lower latency (effectively instant response) and benefits from no per-use fees such as those common to cloud services. It can also work without the need fora constant internet connection.
This should, in theory, make it very attractive for home assistant-type setups, small businesses, and engineers prototyping edge AI products. The device also comes with a special microcontroller that can handle power monitoring, buttons, a status screen, and an RGB LED ring.
Given the very specialist nature of the new pyramid computer, it should come as no surprise that it is not aimed at general release. Rather, its target audience will most likely be Edge-AI developers, embedded engineers, and makers doing serious AI projects.
It should also appeal to anyone who wants Jetson-style capability without Nvidia pricing.
