Blaize debuts new AI Edge computing offerings

Blaize has today announced the company's first AI computing hardware and software products for compute and productisation of AI applications at the edge.

The Blaize Pathfinder and Xplorer platforms, coupled with the Blaize AI Software Suite, enable developers to utilise practical and commercially viable edge AI products across edge use cases and industries.

"Today's edge solutions are either too small to compute the load or too costly and too hard to productise," says Blaize co-founder and chief executive officer Dinakar Munagala.

"Blaize AI edge computing products overcome these limitations of power, complexity and cost to unleash the adoption of AI at the edge, facilitating the migration of AI computing out of the data center to the edge.

Edge AI markets are projected to grow rapidly, with Omdia Research projecting edge chipset revenue to reach US$51 billion by 2025.

This is largely due to increased demand for AI at the edge, which is transforming entire industries as AI functionality becomes a must-have requirement for new products, according to Blaize.

The Blaize embedded and accelerator platforms are built on the Blaize Graph Streaming Processor (GSP) architecture designed for the demands of edge computing.

The GSP features 16 GSP cores and 16TOPS of AI inference performance within a 7W power envelope. In addition, GSP enables 50x less memory bandwidth, and 10x lower latency than GPU/CPUs for edge AI applications.

The P1600 embedded Systems on Module (SOM) brings the benefits of the GSP to embedded edge AI applications deployed at the sensor edge, or on the network edge.

No host processor is necessary for the P1600.

Blaize Xplorer platforms are built to accelerate AI applications at the edge of the enterprise via easy plug- in to the PCIe slot in a host server or appliance.

The X1600E is a small form factor accelerator platform for small and power-constrained environments such as convenience stores or industrial sites.

This is an accelerator form factor available from Blaize due to the efficiency of the GSP – and can be easily added to accelerate AI apps in industrial PCs or as a rack of cards in a small 1U server.

The X1600P is a standard PCIe-based accelerator in a half-height, half-width form factor. The X1600P can replace a power-hungry desktop GPU in edge servers and provide anywhere from 16-64TOPS of AI inference performance within a very low power envelope.

The Blaize AI software suite is built on open standards with ease of accessibility to liberate product developers from being locked to proprietary development environments.

Comprised of the Picasso software development kit (SDK), and AI Studio, a code-free visual interface, the software suite offers tools for both traditional developers and non-coder domain experts.

In addition, both tools sets utilise Blaize Netdeploy, a Blaize innovation with edge-aware algorithms to get the best accuracy and performance for edge deployments.