RISC-V pioneer SiFive has announced a partnership with energy-efficient edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) specialist Kinara to launch a USB gadget designed to provide developers with access to RISC-V cores and the Ara-2 neural coprocessor without needing a dedicated RISC-V development machine: the HiFive Xara X280.
“SiFive’s RISC-V cores are a perfect complement to Kinara’s neural processor cores enabling performance- and cost-optimized end to end inference for edge AI use cases,” claims Kinara chief executive officer Ravi Annavajjhala of the partnership. “Together with SiFive, the combined solution is capable of supporting a range of AI workloads, from traditional CNNs [Convolutional Neural Networks] to advanced generative AI and multi-modal vision transformers.”