Growing MCU capabilities shift more AI from the cloud to the edge

Battery life (the time between charges) is a crucial figure of merit for many types of portable, wearable, mobile and remotely located devices, from smart glasses and smart watches to agricultural sensors for measuring soil conditions or animal health. We now know from research cited in an earlier blog that energy consumption can be at least five times lower when AI inference is performed locally on an ESP32-S3 system-on-chip (SoC) than when raw data is transferred wirelessly to the cloud for inference.