Particle's Qualcomm-Powered Edge AI 5G-Connected Tachyon Single-Board Computer Hits the Mainstream

Following a barnstorming crowdfunding campaign in August last year, Particle has announced that its Tachyon single-board computer (SBC) is now generally available — offering on-board acceleration for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads and 5G cellular connectivity.

"Tachyon is a 5G-connected single-board computer that takes the technology inside a modern smartphone and packs it into a Raspberry Pi form factor to power portable and remote computing devices,' Particle explains of the device. "With a powerful Qualcomm Dragonwing SoC [System-on-Chip], an AI accelerator, and Particle's application infrastructure, Tachyon combines all of the edge computing power, connectivity, and software necessary to embed intelligence into anything, anywhere."

Particle unveiled the Tachyon in a crowdfunding campaign last year, quickly beating its modest $10,000 goal and ending with over half a million dollars in pre-orders. At launch, the device was to have 4GB of RAM and 64GB of on-board flash — but the popularity of the campaign saw the company meet demand by announcing an upgrade to 8GB of RAM and 128GB of flash.

The heart of the credit card-sized Tachyon is the Qualcomm Dragonwing QCM6490, a 5G cellular system-on-chip with a Kryo Arm-based processor boasting one high-performance core running at 2.7GHz, three mid-performance cores running at 2.4GHz, and four low-power cores running at 1.9GHz. There's an Adreno 643 graphics processor, plus a neural coprocessor capable of delivering a claimed 12 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of minimum-precision compute. In addition to the 5G cellular connectivity, with 4G LTE fallback, there's also Wi-Fi 6E for connectivity to a local network.

The way the Tachyon handles its cellular connectivity is worth explaining: where most cellular IoT devices use a nanoSIM slot and expect you to find a carrier yourself the Tachyon uses what Particle calls "EtherSIM+," a reprogrammable embedded SIM (eSIM) that provides access to connectivity in 40 countries worldwide, with low-bandwidth connections available for the first hundred devices on an account free of charge — good enough, the company says, for remote telemetry and device management tasks.

The Tachyon is now available to order on the Particle store, in North American and global variants, priced at $299. You can also enter Hackster's On the Edge Giveaway for a chance to win one through October 5th.