Hardware 101

Abstract

AIoT hardware includes all the physical components required to build an AIoT product or retrofit solution. For the retrofit solution, this will usually include sensors, as well as edge and cloud (or on-premises) compute resources. Most retrofit solutions will not include actuators. Products, on the other hand, must not only provide IT-related hardware plus sensors, actuators and AI compute resources but also all the mechanical components for the product, as well as the product chassis, body and housing. Finally, both AIoT products and solutions will usually require specialized IT hardware for AI inferencing and AI training. The concepts developed for Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) will also be of relevance here. The following will look at both the AIoT product and retrofit solution perspective before discussing details of the hardware requirements and options for edge/cloud/AI (Fig. 6.1).