Sixfab Opens Crowdfunding for Its Ready-to-Go Raspberry Pi CM5-Powered ALPON X5 Edge AI Box

Raspberry Pi-powered Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing specialist Sixfab has launched an "industrial-grade" device for machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML and AI) at the edge — the ALPON X5 AI, driven by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 paired with a DEEPX DX-M1 neural network coprocessor.

"We created ALPON X5 AI because we saw a genuine need for a platform that combines industrial performance with the simplicity and openness developers love about Raspberry Pi," says Sixfab co-founder and chief executive officer Sait Borlak of the company's design. "Our vision is straightforward yet ambitious: to empower every innovator to build intelligent, secure, and private AI applications at the edge, without barriers."

The ALPON X5 AI is built around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, the computer-on-module variant of the popular Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer — taking the same quad-core Broadcom BCM2712 system-on-chip but leaving peripheral connectivity up to the designer of the carrier board into which it's installed. To better suit the target workload of edge AI, Sixfab has paired this with a DEEPX DX-M1 accelerator, a neural coprocessor that delivers a claimed 25 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at minimum precision.

The custom carrier board, which includes a global 4G LTE cellular modem with embedded SIM (eSIM) in addition to the dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios available on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 itself, is installed in an "industrial-grade" aluminum enclosure that, the company says, can keep both the Broadcom BCM2712 and the DEEPX DX-M1 running cool without the need for a fan.

Sixfab's biggest selling point for the ALPON X5 AI, though, isn't in the hardware but the software — promising that the gadget will arrive to backers "ready to use out of the box." The company says that users can "go from unboxing to live AI inference within minutes."

Its claims for the capabilities of the DEEPX DX-M1, though, should be taken with a pinch of salt: the company claims the 25 TOPS accelerator delivers "equivalent performance" to a graphics processor delivering 200 TOPS, matching an NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX module in YOLOv5s performance while vastly outstripping it in energy efficiency — the accelerator drawing just 3.5W, an order of magnitude less than NVIDIA's more powerful device.

Sixfab is currently crowdfunding production of the ALPON X5 AI on Kickstarter, with physical rewards starting at $549 for "super early bird" backers; all devices are expected to ship in December this year, the company says.