AAEON Targets Edge AI Workloads with Its Intel-Powered UP TWL and ARL Single-Board Computers

AAEON has announced three new entries in its UP single-board computer line-up, all aimed at edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) and on-device machine learning (ML) projects: the UP TWL and ARL AI Dev Kit range.

"The UP Squared Pro TWL Dev Kit takes AI performance up a notch with its Palm+ size dev board and integrated AI accelerator options," AAEON says of the mid-range model in its trio of new boards, "providing up to 25 TOPS [minimum-precision Tera-Operations Per Second] of AI inferencing power and in the future supports up to 214 TOPs according to Axelera Metis AI acceleration card."

The AAEON UP Squared Pro TWL AI Dev Kit, brought to our attention alongside its stablemates by Linux Gizmos, is powered by an Intel Processor N150, a 64-bit chip with four cores and four threads running at up to 3.6GHz "turbo" frequency and with 6MB of Intel Smart Cache plus an embedded 24-execution-unit Intel Graphics processor running at up to 1GHz. This is accelerated through the inclusion of a Hailo-8L module, delivering 13 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum precision compute — while those who need more can switch to the DeepX DX-M1 that delivers a claimed 25 TOPS. Finally, the Axelera Metis variant offers a claimed 214 TOPS — though also requires an active cooler, which is included in the bundle. All models include 8GB of memory and 64GB of on-board storage, pre-installed with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and AAEON's own UP AI Suite software "for evaluation purposes."

For the tinkerer on a budget, an "Entry" variant drops to a smaller Raspberry Pi-inspired form factor and loses support for PCI Express accelerator modules — but retains the same Intel Processor N150. 8GB of RAM, and 64GB of EMMC storage. Interestingly, the company's specifications also show an Intel Altera Max V field-programmable gate array (FPGA) on board, in place of a Lattice Semiconductor chip on the mid-range model, but it's not clear whether this is exposed to the user for custom gateware.

At the top end of the new trio is the AAEON UP Xtreme ARL AI Dev Kit, which jumps to the Intel Core Ultra 5 225H processor — meaning a total of 14 processor cores of which four are performance cores running at up to 4.9GHz, eight are efficient cores running at up to 4.3GHz, and two are low-power cores running at up to 2.5GHz, 18MB of cache, and an Intel Arc 130T graphics processor with seven Xe cores and ray-tracing capabilities. This, the company says, can deliver 63 TOPS of minimum-precision compute — and, as before, you can add M.2-format accelerators to boost that further. There's 16GB of RAM this time, and a 256GB M.2 SSD for storage — plus the same Ubuntu 24.04 installation as the rest of the family.

More information on the UP TWL AI Dev Kit Entry, UP Squared Pro TWL AI Dev Kit, and UP Xtreme ARL AI Dev Kit are available on their respective product pages; prices start at $279 for the Entry model, $469 for the mid-range model with Hailo-8L accelerator, and $899 for the UP Xtreme ARL.