ADLINK Wants to Put a Powerful GPGPU in Your Pocket for On-the-Go Machine Learning Acceleration – Hackster.io

Anyone aiming to work with deep learning and artificial intelligence systems on-the-go with a notebook or small form factor PC is about to get an option to supercharge their hardware, courtesy of a pocket-sized external GPU from ADLINK: the Pocket AI, based on an NVIDIA RTX A500 add-in board.

"Pocket AI offers the ultimate in flexibility and reliability on the move," ADLINK claims of its impending hardware launch. "This portable, plug and play AI accelerator delivers a perfect power/performance balance from the NVIDIA RTX GPU. Pocket AI is the perfect device for AI developers, professional graphics users and embedded industrial applications for boosting productivity by improve the work efficiency."

The compact device takes advantage of the ability to use PCI Express lanes over a Thunderbolt USB Type-C connector to interface devices without the room for a full-size PCIe graphics card like notebooks to one of NVIDIA's more powerful examples.

In the case of the launch model, that's an NVIDIA RTX A500 graphics card, based on the Ampere GA107 architecture, which offers 2,048 CUDA cores, 64 Tensor cores, and 16 RT cores. All told, that's equivalent to a claimed 6.54 tera-floating point operations per second (TFLOPS) of FP32-precision compute, or 100 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of dense INT8 performance.

The idea behind the device: to act as a simple plug-and-play accelerator for deep learning and artificial intelligence workloads, as well as graphically-demanding tasks including ray tracing. The device is powered by USB Power Delivery (USB PD) on a second Type-C port, measures just 10672mm (around 4.172.83"), and weighs 250g (around 8.8oz) making it easily portable. The only catch: just 4GB of GDDR6 memory, meaning that the device may struggle fitting larger models into RAM.

More information on the device is available on the ADLINK website, though the company has yet to reveal pricing but has confirmed plans to open pre-orders this month, with shipping due to commence in June.

Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.

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ADLINK Wants to Put a Powerful GPGPU in Your Pocket for On-the-Go Machine Learning Acceleration - Hackster.io

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