Canaan's Kendryte K510 CRB-KIT Aims to Make RISC-V Edge AI Projects a Cinch with 3 TOPS of Compute

Canaan has launched a system-on-module and carrier board set designed to get users started with the edge AI RISC-V Kendryte K510 system-on-chip: the Kendryte K510 CRB-KIT.

The developer's kit, brought to our attention by CNX Software, includes a carrier board which accepts the Kendryte K510-CORE system-on-module, a dual-camera expansion board, and a rear-mounted color LCD, all housed in a compact acrylic casing designed to protect the parts while still providing access to required ports and headers.

The K510 chip at the heart of the kit features a dual-core 64-bit RISC-V processor running at up to 800MHz, a third RISC-V core dedicated for digital signal processing, and a Kendryte Processing Unit (KPU) neural network accelerator, all of which combine to drive a claim of 3 trillion operations per second (TOPS) overall compute — enough, its creators claim, for live-vision and audio edge AI projects on up to three video streams simultaneously.

The design also includes hardware H.264 video encoding for two channels of 1080p at 60 frames per second, 512MB of LPDDR3 memory, 16GB of on-board eMMC storage with microSD expansion, and two MIPI CSI ports for the bundled camera board. There's an HDMI output and analog audio, alongside the on-board color LCD panel, with gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB connectivity.

More details are available on the Canaan website, while the software development kit has been published to GitHub under the permissive BSD two-clause license — but, at the time of writing, was documented exclusively in Chinese. The kits themselves are available to purchase on AnalogLamb now, at $199 per unit.