Codesota · Embedded AI · Vol. IIThe register of edge silicon — every watt, every TOPIssue: April 22, 2026
§ 00 · Embedded AI

On the edge, measured.

The independent register for NPUs that leave the datacenter behind — Hailo-8, 8L, 10H, 15H first, with Jetson Orin, Coral, Rockchip, Qualcomm and the Apple Neural Engine held next to them. Numbers taken from the public Hailo Model Zoo — INT8 (or INT4 for LLMs on 10H), batch 1, on reference boards.

5 Hailo chips covered · 21 benchmarked models · 9 detection / seg variants · 3 on-device LLMs on Hailo-10H.

§ 01 · Hailo chips

Seven watts, to forty TOPS.

Hailo builds NPUs that keep all model memory on die — no external DRAM lookups during inference. That decision buys predictable latency and very high perf-per-watt; it also means the model has to fit, or be partitioned by the Hailo compiler.


Family
Accelerator · Vision Processor
Quantisation
INT8 default · INT4 for LLMs on 10H
Runtime
HailoRT · x86 · ARM · Raspberry Pi
Compile
Dataflow Compiler → .hef
Five chips · Hailo lineup
Shaded row marks the generative-AI flagship
ChipFamilyPerformancePowerFormBest forReleasedStatus
Hailo-8LAccelerator13 TOPS (INT8)~1.5 W typicalM.2 / PCIeCost-sensitive edge: single-stream detection, smart home, POS2023Shipping
Hailo-8Accelerator26 TOPS (INT8)~2.5 W typicalM.2 / PCIe / SoMMulti-stream CV: smart cameras, retail analytics, Raspberry Pi 5 AI kit2021Shipping
Hailo-10HAccelerator40 TOPS (INT4)~2.5 W typicalM.2On-device LLMs/VLMs, Llama 3 8B at 10+ tok/s, generative edge AI2025-07New
Hailo-15HVision Processor20 TOPS (INT8)~3-5 WSoC (VPU)High-end smart cameras with on-chip ISP + NN core2023Shipping
Hailo-15LVision Processor7 TOPS (INT8)~2 WSoC (VPU)Mass-market IP cameras replacing traditional SoCs2024Mass market
Fig 1 · Hailo-10H launched July 2025 as the first Hailo accelerator with on-chip generative-AI capability. Hailo-8 remains the workhorse for multi-stream CV — it ships in the official Raspberry Pi 5 AI Kit.
§ 02 · Competitor silicon

The wider edge shelf.

Hailo is the primary lens of this register, but the edge shelf is wider. Jetson Orin owns the CUDA-native robotics lane; Google Coral is the old reliable for TFLite classifiers; Rockchip and Qualcomm ship inside SBCs and phones; the Apple Neural Engine quietly runs CoreML on every M-series machine.

Numbers from vendor product pages. Direct head-to-head is an active research frontier — workloads, quantisation, batch size and toolchains all shift the answer.

Six competitor chips · reference only
Held against Hailo, not ranked
ChipVendorPerformancePower envelopeRole
Jetson Orin Nano (8GB)NVIDIA40 TOPS (INT8)7–15 WCUDA-capable edge dev kit — robotics, vision, early LLM
Jetson AGX Orin (64GB)NVIDIA275 TOPS (INT8)15–60 WAutonomous machines · large VLMs on the edge
Coral Edge TPU (USB / M.2)Google4 TOPS (INT8)~2 WTFLite-only · classic classifier & detector workloads
Rockchip RK3588 NPURockchip6 TOPS (INT8)SoC envelopeSBC / mini-PC workhorse · ARM + NPU + GPU
Qualcomm QCS8550Qualcomm~48 TOPS (INT8)SoC envelopeHexagon NPU · IoT, robotics, Android-class devices
Apple Neural Engine (M-series)Apple~18–38 TOPS (INT8)SoC envelopemacOS / iOS on-device inference · CoreML
Fig 2 · Vendor-reported TOPS. For a deeper silicon register see /hardware — datacenter and consumer GPUs.
§ 03 · Benchmarks summary

Eight workloads. One chip at a time.

The same chip is fast at vision and slow at OCR; Hailo-10H runs an 8B LLM at decode-interactive speed and, in the same envelope, clears 275 FPS on YOLOv8n. Each panel ends at a real number from the Hailo Model Zoo.

Vision on edge
202326
275YOLOv8n · FPS ↑
Detection (newest)
202326
250YOLO26n · FPS ↑
Classification
202326
1,750ResNet-50 · FPS ↑
OCR
202326
65PaddleOCR-v5 · FPS ↑
LLM on 10H · 3B
202326
28Llama 3.2 · tok/s ↑
LLM on 10H · 8B
202326
11Llama 3.1 · tok/s ↑
Image embeddings
202326
42CLIP L/14 · FPS ↑
Face recognition
202326
890ArcFace R50 · FPS ↑
Fig 3 · Dot marks the figure published in the Hailo Model Zoo. Trend is directional — architectural lineage, not a per-submission history.
§ 04 · Model catalog

Pre-compiled, per chip.

FPS from the public Hailo Model Zoo. INT8, batch 1, reference boards. LLM rows are INT4 decode tok/s with 2K context on Hailo-10H. A dash means the model is not officially compiled for that chip.

Detection
ModelInputParamsHailo-8LHailo-8Hailo-10HHailo-15HNotes
YOLOv11n640×6402.6M135210260240Latest YOLO nano, NMS on-chip
YOLOv11s640×6409.4M72140175160Balanced accuracy/speed
YOLOv11m640×64020.1M38709585Higher mAP for demanding scenes
YOLOv8n640×6403.2M150235275255Most deployed edge detector
YOLOv8s640×64011.2M78150180165
Detection / Seg
ModelInputParamsHailo-8LHailo-8Hailo-10HHailo-15HNotes
YOLO26n640×6403.0M——250230NMS-free, newest family
Oriented BBox
ModelInputParamsHailo-8LHailo-8Hailo-10HHailo-15HNotes
YOLOv11n-obb640×6402.7M——210195Rotated boxes for aerial/industrial
Instance Seg
ModelInputParamsHailo-8LHailo-8Hailo-10HHailo-15HNotes
YOLOv8n-seg640×6403.4M85155190175
YOLOv5n-seg-hpp640×6402.0M120195230215HailoRT-accelerated post-process
Pose
ModelInputParamsHailo-8LHailo-8Hailo-10HHailo-15HNotes
YOLOv8n-pose640×6403.3M8816019518017-keypoint human pose
Classification
ModelInputParamsHailo-8LHailo-8Hailo-10HHailo-15HNotes
ResNet-50224×22425.6M7201,3901,7501,500ImageNet reference
MobileNet V3224×2245.4M1,6002,8003,4003,100Fastest production classifier
EfficientNet-B0224×2245.3M1,0201,8502,3002,050
OCR
ModelInputParamsHailo-8LHailo-8Hailo-10HHailo-15HNotes
PaddleOCR-v5 (det+rec)Multi~12M22456558Latest PP-OCR pipeline
Face Detection
ModelInputParamsHailo-8LHailo-8Hailo-10HHailo-15HNotes
RetinaFace MobileNet736×12800.4M85140165150
Face Recognition
ModelInputParamsHailo-8LHailo-8Hailo-10HHailo-15HNotes
ArcFace R50112×11243.6M380720890800
Monocular Depth
ModelInputParamsHailo-8LHailo-8Hailo-10HHailo-15HNotes
FastDepth224×2243.9M380640790710
Embeddings
ModelInputParamsHailo-8LHailo-8Hailo-10HHailo-15HNotes
CLIP ViT-L/14 (Laion2B)224×224304M——4228Image embeddings for retrieval
LLM (INT4)
ModelInputParamsHailo-8LHailo-8Hailo-10HHailo-15HNotes
Llama 3.2 3B—3.2B——28—tok/s decode, 2K ctx
Llama 3.1 8B—8.0B——11—tok/s decode, 2K ctx
Qwen 2.5 1.5B—1.5B——45—tok/s decode
Fig 4 · Frames per second, except LLM (INT4) rows — those are tokens per second at decode. Source of truth is the upstream Model Zoo; we republish for legibility only.
§ 05 · Sub-pages

Deeper reads, per chip family.

Each sub-page carries its own evidence table. This hub is the index; the work is below.

Fig 5 · Sub-pages land one chip family at a time. Per-model HEF pages are the next beachhead — one URL per model × chip combo, with SHA256 and calibration notes.
§ 06
What is HEF?

The binary that actually runs.

HEF — Hailo Executable Format — is the compiled binary that runs on a Hailo chip. You cannot load a PyTorch or ONNX model directly. The Hailo Dataflow Compiler converts it, quantises the weights, maps operations onto the NPU's cores and memory, and produces a single .hef file.

The compile step takes minutes to hours and needs a licence. Quantisation quality depends on calibration data — bad calibration, bad accuracy. Each chip has its own HEF; a Hailo-8 HEF does not run on a 10H. Most deployments want "give me YOLOv11n for Hailo-8, verified" — not a compile pipeline.

Pipeline: ONNX → hailo parser → HAR → hailo optimize (with calibration set) → quantised HAR → hailo compile → .hef → HailoRT → ConfiguredNetworkGroup → inference.

§ 07 · Related

Neighbouring registers.

Hub pages across Codesota worth reading next.

Hardware · GPU register →
Consumer and datacenter accelerators, priced honestly.
LLM · register →
Frontier language models — the cloud counterpart to 10H LLMs.
Vision · router →
Detection, classification and seg benchmarks across backbones.
Speech · register →
ASR and TTS — the speech half of the edge pipeline.
Audio · register →
Audio classification, captioning, music generation.
All benchmarks →
Every tracked task across every modality.
Methodology →
How Codesota reproduces and publishes results.
Benchmarks sourced from the public Hailo Model Zoo and Hailo datasheets. Page maintained by CodeSOTA.