Also known as: Coral, Edge TPU
Google Coral is a hardware platform built around the Edge TPU, a small AI accelerator that runs machine-learning models locally rather than in the cloud.1
Overview
The Edge TPU is a cut-down tensor processing unit that executes TensorFlow Lite models very efficiently at low power. Coral ships in several forms: a full single-board computer (the Coral Dev Board), a solder-down module, and a USB Accelerator stick that adds the TPU to an existing host such as a Raspberry Pi.2
What it’s for
Coral targets edge AI: on-device vision, audio, and sensor inference where sending data to a server is too slow, too costly, or impossible. It is a more specialised choice than an NVIDIA Jetson — the Edge TPU runs supported quantised models fast and cheap, but it is not a general GPU. In a signal-processing project, a Coral could classify or flag patterns in decoded data at the edge while a Pi handles the radio.