Pocket AI accelerator in the form of a USB stick

While new processors already include NPUs, Asus offers an elegant solution for everyone else. The new UGen300 is an external AI accelerator that simply plugs into a USB port. The device allows for local processing of complex AI algorithms without relying on the cloud, providing greater privacy and speed for tasks such as image and pattern recognition.

Photo: Asus

Adding AI to your PC has never been easier. Asus has announced the UGen300, an innovative USB dongle expansion card that uses the USB 3.1 Gen 2 standard for communication. This means that you don't need to have any free PCIe slots or access the inside of the case to install it. The device is equipped with a powerful Hailo 10H neural processing unit (NPU) that achieves a performance of 40 TOPS (in INT4 operations).

One of the biggest advantages of the device is its energy efficiency, with typical consumption of just 2.5 watts, which is practically negligible. Inside the stick is also 8 GB of LPDDR4 dedicated system memory. While this will not be enough for the most demanding professional models, which sometimes require more than 100 GB of system memory, it is more than adequate for running the more than 100 pre-built models that Asus offers in its library.

The UGen300 is highly flexible, supporting both x86 and ARM platforms, as well as Windows, Linux, and Android operating systems. It is compatible with leading frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and ONNX. While Asus has not yet revealed an official price, the device is expected to cost between €140 and €190. It is a cost-effective way to extend the life of existing systems that are not equipped with the latest processors with Copilot+ support.