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Google has officially released its Edge TPU (TPU stands for tensor processing unit) processors in its new Coral development board and USB accelerator. The Edge TPU is Google’s inference-focused application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that targets low-power “edge” devices and complements the company’s “Cloud TPU,” which targets data centers. Coral Dev Board With Edge TPU Last July, Google announced that it’s working on a low-power version of its Cloud TPU to cater to Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The Edge TPU’s main promise is to free IoT devices from cloud dependence when it comes to intelligent analysis of data. For instance, a surveillance camera would no longer need to identify objects it sees in real-time through cloud analysis and could instead do so on its own, locally, thanks to the Edge TPU. Google has now made available for developers a Raspberry Pi-style development board that comes with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 CPU, an Arm Cortex-M4F real-time core and a Vivante GC7000 Lite GPU -- all of which are connected to Google’s Edge TPU co-processor, capable of up to 4 trillion operations per second (TOPS). The board also ships with 1GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 8GB of eMMC (embedded MultiMediaCard) memory, Wi-Fi 2×2 MIMO (802.11b/g/n/ac 2.4/5GHz bands) and Bluetooth 4.1. It supports Debian Linux and the TensorFlow Lite machine learning software framework. The board costs $149.99. Coral USB Accelerator Google also revealed a USB accelerator, which is similar to Intel’s Neural Compute Stick. However, just like the Coral dev board, the Coral USB Accelerator also comes with an embedded Edge TPU. It's supposed to have low power demand and comes in a more accessible form to developers, who can connect it to other computers or even other boards, such as a Raspberry Pi, to give them a machine learning performance boost. The Coral USB Accelerators also comes with a Cortex-M0+ microcontroller clocked at 32MHz, 16KB of flash memory and 2KB of RAM. It can connect to other devices via a USB Type-C connector that supports 5Gb/s. The USB Accelerator, which also supports TensorFlow Lite, costs $74.99. Google's TPUs Back in 2016, Google surprised the world with its own machine learning-focused processor called a “tensor processing unit." According to Google, the TPU was up to 30 times faster and more efficient than other CPUs and GPUs for certain po[CENSORED]r machine learning training and inference applications. This is because the chip was designed from the beginning with machine learning in mind. Later on, Nvidia also started integrating “tensor cores” into its GPUs, shrinking the disparity between the two architecture types significantly. However, Google’s latest Cloud TPUs still seems to have some advantages in terms of performance and price over Nvidia’s GPUs. One of the primary reasons for open sourcing the TensorFlow framework, which Google was using internally for its own machine learning projects and later to develop hardware optimized for it, was that this enabled an entire ecosystem of developers and projects that essentially kept improving Google’s software. Even third-parties, including Nvidia, have started building hardware that works well with the TensorFlow framework. Now that Google has started selling highly optimized TensorFlow chips for the booming IoT industry, the TensorFlow framework is likely to become even more po[CENSORED]r. Article made by Tomshardware.

MOUNTAIN VIEW -- Android P is looking to take your digital life and make it more calm and organized. At the Google I/O 2018 Keynote event today (May 8), we saw how Google's adding features to make your phone adapt to you, cleaning up its user interface, and offering you tools so smartphone addicts can disconnect. The Android P Beta is now available to download on Google's Pixel devices, as well as select flagship devices from Essential, Nokia, OnePlus, Sony, and other vendors. That's a change from past Android updates when betas were restricted to Google's Pixel and Nexus devices. Here’s what you can expect if you put Android P on your phone. Design: Android cleans up nicely While we heard rumors of the iPhone X's notch being formalized in Android, Google spent time at I/O to show how it's cleaning up Android's look. First of all, the Google search bar is moving from the top of the screen to the bottom, so it's within reach, and you're not stretching your fingers. Google also slimmed down the home button and added new navigational gestures. Now, if you slide up from the home button on the bottom of the screen, you'll see all of your app icons. Sliding your home button to the left opens up multitasking views, and you'll be able to perform quick actions from this view, such as opening Spotify to listen to music from bands you're reading about in Chrome. Android's also getting App Actions. These are buttons for actions based around your habits, when Android can guess it knows what you want to do next. You'll also see more of the apps you love inside of Android, thanks to Slices, where parts of apps — such as the ride-booking buttons from Lyft — will show up in your search results. This way, you'll finish what you want to do faster. Also, the volume buttons on Android phones will now default to adjusting the media volume settings instead of changing your notification sounds. (This announcement earned a large round of applause from the Google I/O attendees.) Adaptive Android: Smarter battery use, display dimming Google touted on-device machine learning as one of its major weapons in learning what you do to make your phone run more smoothly. The first of these features is Adaptive Battery, where your phone will learn what apps you use most often and adjust how it uses energy appropriately. This resulted in a 30 percent reduction in CPU app wakeups, which Google said lead to "an increase in battery life for many users," though it didn't specify by how much. Its other major feature is Adaptive Brightness, in which Android won't rely on just the ambient lighting around you to set the screen to the proper brightness. Google noted that automatic brightness settings often lead to users manually adjusting their screen brightness, and this feature will let your phone learn your preferred brightness. This allowed half the users testing the feature to stop fidgeting with their phone's brightness. In an effort to ease privacy concerns, Google repeatedly emphasized how the machine learning takes place on-device "keeping data private and out of the cloud." Wellness means rethinking our tech addiction Wellness was a major theme for Google, which highlighted how easy it can be to get lost in our portable screens. The Dashboard is central to Google's analysis of how much you use your phone, and it will track how much you use it, how many times you unlock it, your Gmail habits, and the hours of YouTube videos you consume. Putting down your phone at dinner can be a big problem, so Google's adding a Shush gesture that enables Do Not Disturb mode. To activate Shush, simply put your phone face down on the table. Because Do Not Disturb mode will mute notifications, including calls, Android allows you to set Starred Contacts. This way, you can instruct your Android device to always send you notifications from the important people in your life. For all the apps you spend too much time on — for me, it's Twitter — you can set app-by-app usage limits. Android will nudge you when you're nearing those limits and gray out the app icons when you've reached them. The apps should still work, so you're not shut out all together if something important happens. No more out-of-date apps Google is cracking down on apps designed for previous generations of Android in the P developer build, The Verge noted. If an app doesn't use a recent SDK targeting Android 4.2 or later, users will see a pop-up alert when they try to install it. Google will also require new apps to target Android Oreo by November. What's in a name? While Google outlined many — though not all — of P's features, it still hasn't told us what dessert-themed name the Android update will take. But that's not surprising: Google rarely reveals that information at its developers conference, saving the naming announcement for later in the summer, closer to the actual release date. Rumored candidates for the official name include Popsicle, Pineapple Cake, and many variations on Pie.