Canaan Kendryte K210
Product Overview
The Kendryte K210 is the world's first mass-produced commercial edge AI chip based on the RISC-V architecture, released on September 6, 2018 by the Kendryte team under Canaan Inc. Fully developed in-house, it integrates a vision neural network accelerator KPU and an audio processing unit APU, and was among the first edge SoCs to achieve "audio-visual in one", providing about 1 TOPS of compute (KPU peak 0.8 TOPS) at 0.3W.
Thanks to its open-source ecosystem (Sipeed Maix series dev boards, MaixPy MicroPython), the K210 became a staple of edge AI and embedded education, widely used in smart door locks, smart metering, facial access control, agricultural monitoring, and more.
Follow-up note: According to Jon Peddie Research, Canaan shut down the Kendryte AI division on June 23, 2025. The K210 chip itself remains a mass-produced historical product with an active dev board ecosystem, but the vendor's AI business has been terminated.
Core Specifications
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Architecture | Dual-core 64-bit RISC-V (@400MHz, each with FPU) + KPU + APU + FFT engine |
| Process Node | 28nm (TSMC) |
| FP16 / BF16 Compute | Not disclosed |
| INT8 Compute | About 0.8 TOPS (KPU peak; some dev boards label 0.23 TOPS of multiply-operator compute) |
| FP32 Compute | Not disclosed (16-bit fixed-point multiply at about the 0.3 TOPS level) |
| Memory Capacity | 8MB on-chip SRAM (no external memory required) |
| Memory Type | On-chip SRAM |
| Memory Bandwidth | Not disclosed |
| TDP | About 0.3 W (typical), peak < 1 W |
| Interconnect | DVP camera, I2S/I2C/UART/GPIO, FPIOA fully programmable IO |
| Interface | SoC onboard / dev board (Maix series) |
| Launch | 2018-09 |
| Mass Production/Availability | In mass production 2018 |
Key Features
- World's first RISC-V edge AI chip: fully proprietary IP, a precedent for mass commercial production.
- Audio-visual in one: KPU vision + APU 8-microphone-array voice; sees and hears on a single chip.
- 8MB on-chip SRAM: model weights reside on-chip, no external DDR required.
- Sub-watt power: 0.3W typical, on par with MCUs, suited to battery/always-on scenarios.
- Industrial temperature range: -40°C ~ +125°C, enabling automotive/industrial deployment.
- FPIOA programmable IO: any peripheral mapped to any pin, simplifying board design.
- Active ecosystem: MaixPy (MicroPython) + C SDK, TensorFlow/Keras/Darknet converted to K-Model.
Vendor Information
| Item | Details |
|---|---|
| Company | Canaan Inc. (Nasdaq: CAN) |
| Headquarters | Beijing, China (offices in Hangzhou and Singapore) |
| Founded | 2013 |
Use Cases
- ✅ Edge vision/hearing, smart door locks, smart metering, educational dev boards, service robots, agricultural/energy monitoring
- ❌ LLM inference, high-resolution multi-stream video, high-performance general-purpose computing
Related Cards
- /docs/cards/others/canaan-k510 — Next generation in the same series (3 TOPS)
- /docs/cards/others/hailo — International edge NPU comparison
- /docs/cards/others/moore-threads-mtt-s5000 — Chinese GPU compute card comparison