I’ve got a homelab setup that could benefit from low-power AI acceleration, which could let me run Whisper and distilled models locally and integrate with my serviced ie. home assistant. Plus, the less data I send over my network the happier I’ll be.
I don’t really want to stuff a GPU into my system right now, I dont have much power budget and GPUs can get pricey for the cost of one that’s useful. I’ve seen a few examples of “Edge accelerators” which boast a super tiny (2-5w) power envelope and 40 TOPs, but that doesn’t tell me much about how well models will actually work in practice.
Is there any kind of mapping between TOPs and, say, tokens per second for X model? Maybe recommended TOPs for X model?
Laziness and the prospect of a cheap hack to avoid having to drag my server out of it’s confines to sort it. Saw an ad a while ago and had the thought ever since!
Oh, and the Coral TPUs are at least m.2, but yeah I can see why usb dongles are just a meme…
At least try running a local model on your regular computer first to see whether you can deal with how shit they are. The quality of a model is roughly proportional to its size in memory (that’s why the memory chip market is fucked right now). Computation speed only controls how fast it generates tokens.