AI vision processing moving to the edge is an undeniable industry trend. OpenFive, the custom silicon business unit of SiFive, discusses this trend with compelling facts in their recent paper titled “Enabling AI Vision at the Edge.” AI vision is being deployed in many applications, such as autonomous vehicles, smart cities, agriculture, industrial & warehouse robotics, delivery drones, augmented reality, and smart retail & home.
Initially, it was only feasible to run AI vision processing in the cloud due to its capacity and processing power requirements. However, as billions of devices are deployed, processing solely in the cloud becomes unscalable. The network bandwidth requirements from billions of devices capturing high-resolution video from multiple cameras would exceed 5 petabytes per second!