Product of the Week: AMD’s Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2

March 10, 2025

Story

It’s clear that in today’s fast-paced technological landscape, there’s a growing need for AI that’s not going anywhere anytime soon. The demand for real-time preprocessing, AI inferencing, and enhanced postprocessing is paramount to the acceleration of embedded AI applications like autonomous driving, industrial PCs, detection and tracking, 3D imaging, and more.

To help developers keep up with the demands of advanced AI acceleration and reap the benefits of scalable computing, the Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 SoCs, an expansion of the AMD Versal adaptive system on chip (SoC) portfolio, are designed to enable the full capabilities of AI at the edge.

The Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 in Action

The processing system of the Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 features up to 8x Arm Cortex-A78AE application processors providing up to 200k DMIPs, up to 10x Arm Cortex-R52 real-time processors, and support for USB 3.2, DisplayPort 1.4, 10G Ethernet, PCIe® Gen5, and more.

For AI inferencing, the solution features the new AIE-ML v2 tile architecture leveraging up to 3X TOPs/watt vs. AIE-ML (projected). The Veral AI Edge solution also supports a variety of expanded data type options designed to improve throughput and performance/watt. To support real-time preprocessing, the series is equipped with FPGA programmable logic featuring low-latency, deterministic, and parallel processing.

The Versal SoCs enable image and video processing via image signal processors (ISPs) and a video codec unit (VCU). The solution also includes support for an integrated GPU featuring a 4-core Arm Mali-G78AE GPU with up to 268 GFLOPs of compute (FP32 MACs), and support for OpenGL® ES 3.2, Vulkan® 1.2, and OpenCL™ 3.0.

Additional features of the Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2 are support for DDR5 @ 6400 Mb/s and LPDDR5X @ 8533 Mb/s, programmable I/O, a high-bandwidth software-programmable network on chip, 32G high-speed serial transceivers, 100G multi-rate Ethernet, and PL-based support for PCIe Gen 5x4, Gen 4x8, and other configurations for high-speed connectivity.

Getting Started with the Versal AI Edge Series Gen 2

The Versal SoCs are designed to ASIL D / SC3 for systematic faults, with functional safety with ASIL D / SIL 3 (random) operation from PS through NoC to DDR memory, and up to 100k DMIPs of compute at ASIL D / SIL 3 (random) operating levels.

For security, the platform integrated HSM-like functionality directly into the device. Additionally, the platform management controller manages secure boot and device-level services, and DDR memory controllers support inline encryption (AES-XTS or AES-GCM).

Additional Resources:

• Product Page: https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/versal/gen2/ai-edge-series.html
• Press Release: https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-4-9-amd-extends-leadership-adaptive-soc-portfolio-with.html