Neural Network Stick

Introduction

Product Overview

The Bitmain Sophon Neural Network Stick (NNS) a fan less USB stick that designed for Deep Learning inference on various edge application. NNS is powered by high performance, low power Sophon BM1880 chip. BM1880 chip supports DNN/CNN/RNN/LSTM models or uniquely trained networks, and can perform facial detection, recognition, facial expression analysis, object detection, recognition, vehicle license plate recognition, voiceprint recognition, etc. The NNS enables traditional product with AI functions, and can be used in smart IPC, Robots, industrial PC, etc.

Neural Network Stick (NNS)

Product Features

  • Power and all data provided over a single USB type A port

  • Supports DNN/CNN/RNN/LSTM models profiling, compiling and tuning

  • Real-time inference in edge device

  • Quickly deploy existing DNN/CNN/RNN/LSTM models or uniquely trained networks

  • Features Bitmain SophonTM BM1880 with energy efficient DNN/CNN/RNN/LSTM processing

Target AI functions

  • Facial detection (Frame by Frame), recognition and expression analysis, such as Age, Gender, etc.

  • Human attributes and pose analysis

  • Object detection and recognition

  • Vehicle license plate recognition

  • Voice print recognition

Product Technical Specification

Processor

Sophon BM1880

Supported Framework

Caffe, ONNX, Tensorflow, Pytorch

Supported AI Models

ResNet50, Yolo V2, GoogleNet V1, MobileNet v1&v2, SSD300, AlexNet, VGG16

H.264 decoder, MJPEG encoder/decoder

1x 1080p @60fps or 2x 1080p @30fps H.264 decoder, 75fps for FHD images

Connectivity

USB3.0/USB2.0 slave mode, Type A

Dimensions

93.52715mm

Operating environmental temperature

0 – 40C (commercial level)

Hot plugin/plugoff

Yes

Certification

EMC/FCC/3C/CE

Minimum system requirement

X86_64 computer running Ubuntu 16.04 USB3.0 or USB2.0 port

Toolkit

  • BMNet: Bitmain Compiler which can convert supported AI models to internal format accelerated by Sophon TPU.

  • ONNX: Compiler which can convert ONNX format to internal format accelerated by Sophon TPU.

  • Quantization Tool: Convert FP32 to INT8 and support calibration function.

Get Started

Setup the Neural Network Stick (NNS) by following the steps provided below.

Step 1: Prepare Your Equipment

In USB mode, BMNNSDK is installed on the X86 host, and calling NNS’s computing for deep learning, the environment requirement are as follows.

  • Hardware environment: X86 host with usb type-A

  • Bitmain Sophon Neural Network Stick (NNS)

  • Operating system: Ubuntu* 16.04 operating system, or Ubuntu VirtualBox instance

  • Package: libgoogle-glog-dev、libboost-all-dev、libprotobuf-dev, libusb-1.0-0-dev

  • Bitmain Sophon Neural Network Software Development Kit (SDK), such as bmtap2-bm1880-usb-x.y.z.tar.gz you can download the compression package from https://www.sophon.cn/drive/36.html

Step 2:Install the BMNNSDK

You can execute below commands to install package

There are two ways to install BMNSDK, you can have a choice

Compression package installation

Compression package include installation script, please copy the compression package to x86, unzip and execute the script install.sh.

The script will install the BMNNSDK to default directory: /opt/bmtap2, and Symbolic Link will be created in the system content:

To uninstall the BMNNSDK ,simply execute the uninstall script in the installation directory.

Step 3: Basic function testing

After installation the SDK, you can estimate whether the software and hardware environment is normal by running the test program in the installation directory(the file system needs to support bash for script execution correctly).

The Basic function testing use the network model and data include in the installation package for Neural Network inference, the test results will be output to the out subdirectory of the current directory, please make sure that the user has the write rights to the current directory.

The test results are as follow:

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