Edge computing is set to be the next big thing in the Internet of Things. There is a rush to bring new low power AI chips to market which will allow devices to have greater autonomy, particularly in areas like video processing and self-driving vehicles. This presentation looks at the current state of development and the emergence of a new generation of silicon startups.

1. IoT – Life at the Edge
Nick Hunn – WiFore Consulting
Presented at “Feeding AI” – a Cambridge Wireless Seminar – Dec 2018

2. The IoT story so far…

3. Towards 50 Billion Connected Devices

4. Amount of
time spent
discussing
LPWAN
Amount of
time spent
discussing
the rest of
the IoT
Amount of time spent designing products
Amount of time spent discussing AI

5. The Comms part is largely done
LPWAN exists
• Sigfox
• LoRa
• Telensa
• Ingenu
• NB-IoT
Low cost data exists
• Sigfox
• LoRa
• 1NCE
Just because it will get better is not a
reason for prevarication.

6. IoT Basics
Data Capture Data Insight
There’s a lot of detail in between…

7. The IoT value stack
Deployment & Physical installation
Algorithm Development
Additional Data Sourcing
Business Applications (vertical)
Business Applications (packaged)
IoT Analytics
Cloud
Device Management
Data Contracts
Comms
Project Management
Data Cleansing & Verification
Security & Updates
Provisioning
Sensor & Physical
Deployment
Applications
& Analytics
M2M / IoT
Infrastructure
(DLC – Device
Life Cycle)
Connectivity
HardwareEDGE

8. The world is producing excessive amounts of
“unstructured data” that need to be reconstructed.
Rob High – CTO, IBM

9. Big Data doesn’t need to reside in one place.
Lots of Little Data is also Big Data.
Learning can be distributed.

10. Because Intel wants to sell more server chips.
Because CISCO wants to sell more infrastructure.
Because the network operators need a story to support 5G.
Why is edge computing such a well kept secret?
And also because it’s difficult.

11. The balance of power
Cloud
• Limited processing power
• Limited resources
• Limited battery life
• Intermittent connectivity
• Lots of processing power
• Lots of resources
• Mains powered
• Aggregated Data
• Additional Data Sources
Processing Power
Thing

12. The balance of power
Thing Cloud
• May need to make real time
decisions
• Can’t guarantee a connection
• May have limited data throughput
• Intermittent uploads
• Very limited downloads
• Little access to additional data
• Difficult to make real-time control
decisions for millions of devices
Autonomy

13. The processing hierarchy
Cloud
• Heavy Lifting
• “Unlimited” resources
Mobile
• Pre-programmed and
learned models
• Video processing, etc.
ThingEdge
• Real-time learning
• Autonomous operation

14. Giga (Billion) Operations per second and Trillion Operations per second
TOPS and GOPS
Intel Xeon 8180M 0.3 TOPS / W
NVIDIA 0.4 TOPS / W
Thing
< 0.05 TOPS 2 - 3 TOPS 25 - 50 TOPS
GreenWaves 0.6 TOPS / W
Kneron offers 1.5 TOPS / W
ARM ML 3 TOPS / W
Novumind 3 TOPS / W
Cambricon 3 TOPS / W
Mythic 4 TOPS / W
Groq 8 TOPS / W
Syntiant 20 TOPS / W

15. Is it training or is it inference?
MLP - Multi-layer Perceptron
CNN - Convolutional Neural Networks
RNN - Recurrent Neural Networks
DNN - Deep Neural Networks – image recognition & voice
The AI Landscape
Machine Learning
Neural Networks
Deep Learning

16. Video Neural Network Engines and AI accelerators

17. Sunrise AI chip for Facial Recognition
Supports 4 x 1920 x 1080 30fps video inputs at under 1.5W
Horizon Robotics

18. Automotive and Audio

19. Google’s Edge TPU
“Edge-based ML inference is vital to delivering reliable,
live, low-latency, and cost-effective smart city IoT. Cloud
IoT Edge and Edge TPU unlock these capabilities in new
ways for the next generation of Smart Parking systems.”
John Heard, Chief Technology Officer, Smart Parking Limited
Edge TPU Features
“The first step in a roadmap that will leverage Google's AI expertise
to follow and reflect in hardware the rapid evolution of AI.”
• Inference Accelerator
• Dev boards coming soon

20. The IoT is getting smarter…
Are you?

21. Nick Hunn
CTO
mob: +44 7768 890 148
email: nick@wifore.com
web: www.wifore.com
Creative Connectivity Blog: www.nickhunn.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/nickhunn
Questions?