Hailo unveils new edge AI accelerators, targeting entry-level and high-capacity applications

Tel Aviv-based Hailo, a startup developing specialized AI accelerators for edge devices, today announced the expansion of its Hailo-8 product lineup with two new offerings: Hailo-8L and Hailo-8 Century. 

Available to order beginning today, the new hardware accelerators are targeted at a diverse range of edge AI applications, catering to both entry-level and high-capacity use cases in fields ranging from security and smart cities to transportation, smart retail, industrial automation and automotive.

The company also claims that both product lines are offered at competitive prices and feature superior power efficiency when compared to other products in the embedded-AI chip market.

“With the power of Hailo-8 now accessible to a wider range of applications and products, catering to both demanding and entry-level use cases, we are driving the industry forward in an era where efficient, scalable edge AI processing is increasingly important for businesses to achieve their targets using enhanced processing and analytic capabilities with unparalleled speed and accuracy,” Orr Danon, CEO at Hailo, said in a statement. 

What Hailo-8L and Hailo-8 Century offer

As the company explained, Hailo-8L is the accelerator designed to support entry-level products requiring limited AI performance. It can deliver up to 13 tera-operations per second (for reference, Hailo-8 delivers up to 26 TOPS) and handle pipelines with multiple real-time streams or concurrent processing of multiple models and AI tasks on edge devices. The accelerator is also compatible with the Hailo-8 software suite for future upgrades to higher AI capacities. 

Meanwhile, the Hailo-8 Century lineup, which brings the Hailo-8 AI accelerator as PCIe cards, delivers 52 to 208 TOPS, enabling deep neural network inferencing in real time on any platform with a 16-lane PCIe slot. This offering is particularly suited for the heavy lifting of applications such as intelligent vision systems or edge video analytics platforms that handle a large number of video streams in real time.

In tests, Hailo-8L ran the ResNet50 benchmark model at 500FPS, while Century high-performance PCIe cards ran this model at up to 10K FPS with a power efficiency of 400 FPS per watt — which Hailo deems as best-in-class. 

While Hailo says both new accelerator offerings are available right away at competitive prices, the cost of Hailo-8L remains undisclosed at this stage. The Century line, on the other hand, starts at $249 for the 52 TOPS variant. This, Hailo said, can lead to a reduction of 70% in edge AI deployment costs.

Other edge AI offerings from Hailo

In addition to the 8-series accelerators, Hailo also offers the Hailo-15 vision processor in its product portfolio. This specialized chip can be embedded in a camera, can target massive camera deployments and can offload the expensive work of cloud vision analytics while conserving power. 

According to Markets and Markets, the global embedded AI market is projected to grow from $9.4 billion in 2023 to $18.0 billion by 2028 with a CAGR of 14.0%.