Nvidia wants AI to Get Out of the Cloud and Into a Camera, Drone, or Other Gadget Near You – IEEE Spectrum

Photo: Tekla Perry Teal's drone uses the Nvidia Jetson module to identify what its cameras see

People arejust now getting comfortable with the ideathat data from many electronic gadgets they use flies up to the cloud. But going forward, much of that data will stick closer to Earth, processed in hardware that lives at the so-called edgefor example, inside security cameras or drones.

Thats why Nvidia, the processor company whose graphics processing units (GPUs) are powering much of the boom in deep learning, is now focused on the edge. Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of the companys Tegra businessunit, says bringing AI technology to the edge will make a new class of intelligent machines possible. These devices will enable intelligent video analytics that keep our cities smarter and safer, new kinds of robots that optimize manufacturing, and new collaboration that makes long-distance work more efficient, he said in a statement.

Why the move to the edge? At a press event held Tuesday in San Francisco, Talla gave four main reasons: bandwidth, latency, privacy, and availability. Bandwidth is becoming an issue for cloud processing, he indicated, particularly for video, because cameras in video applications such aspublic safety are moving to 4K resolution and increasing in numbers. By 2020, there will be 1 billion cameras in the world doing public safety and streaming data, he said. Theres not enough upstream bandwidth available to send all this to the cloud. So, processing at the edge will be an absolute necessity.

Latency, he said, becomes an issue in robotics and self-driving cars, applications in which decisions have to be made with lightning speed. Privacy, of course, is easier to protect when data isnt moving around. And availability of the cloud, Talla pointed out, is an issue in many parts of the world where communications are limited.

We will see AI transferring to the edge, he said, with future intelligent applications using a combination of edge and cloud processing.

Nvidia, of course, wasnt painting this glowing picture of edge computing without some self-interest. At the event, the company announced its new edge-processing platform, the Nvidia Jetson TX2. This credit cardsizemodule is a plug-in replacement for the companys Jetson TX1, designed for embedded computing. Depending on how it is applied, it can either run at twice the speed of its predecessor or use half the power. Detailed specs are here. The developer kit costs $600, $300 for educators; the production version will sell for $400.

Developers, showing off their work at the launch event, were happy to point out how they are using or intend to use internal AI processing at the edge. A few examples:

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Nvidia wants AI to Get Out of the Cloud and Into a Camera, Drone, or Other Gadget Near You - IEEE Spectrum