Chinese firm M5Stack has launched its new AI Pyramid series, a small-form-factor edge AI PC designed for developers and makers working with local inference workloads. The lineup consists of two variants: AI Pyramid and AI Pyramid-Pro, both built around the Axera AX8850 SoC. This chip combines an octa-core Arm Cortex-A55 CPU running at up to 1.7 GHz with a 24 TOPS INT8 NPU.

The platform targets fully local AI processing, covering use cases such as computer vision, multimodal input, and on-device model inference without depending on cloud acceleration. Memory configurations differ between the two versions, with the standard AI Pyramid shipping with 4 GB of LPDDR4x, while the Pro model offers 8 GB. Storage is provided by 32 GB of onboard eMMC.

The AX8850 supports hardware-accelerated H.264 and H.265 encoding and decoding at resolutions up to 8K at 30 FPS, as well as up to 16 concurrent 1080p decode streams. The specs are completed with dual Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0 ports, HDMI output, with the AI Pyramid-Pro adding HDMI input support. Pricing starts at $199 for the 4 GB AI Pyramid Computing Box, with the 8 GB Pro variant listed at $249 on the M5Stack website.