QNAP launches two USB and M.2 NPUs to provide AI acceleration to its NAS

Artificial intelligence is the most powerful trend today in the entire technological field. QNAP has been using devices and technologies in its NAS for some time with which it can accelerate tasks such as facial recognition, video surveillance, file indexing, multimedia, etc.

However, many of these functions require hardware support through compatible CPUs/GPUs and, more recently, NPUs. Until now, if we wanted to enjoy new AI functionalities on a NAS, we had no choice but to purchase a new one.

With its latest launch, QNAP seeks to enable its users to provide AI to their NAS by incorporating some External NPUs in USB format and also in M.2 format. They allow the brand’s NAS to use QNAP AI Core systems, with support for face and object recognition.

On the one hand, we have the QNAP QAI-U100, the model equipped with USB connectivity, with a size similar to that of a USB wifi adapter. It connects to the brand’s NAS and you can even place several to increase performance. Each of these QNAP QAI-U100 offers a power of 3 TOPS, and connects via the USB 3.0 interface (3.2 gen 1 5 Gbps).

On the other hand, with the same power of 3 TOPS, but for those who have an internal M.2 port and do not want to occupy USB ports, QNAP has launched its QAI-M100 in M.2 2280 accelerator card format.

It uses PCIe Gen2 x1 connectivity, so it only requires one PCIe lane to operate.

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