The M5Stack LLM-8850 Card adds 24 TOPS INT8 AI acceleration to Raspberry Pi 5, RK3588 and x86 systems, with active cooling, AXCL Runtime support and 8K H.264/H.265 hardware video processing for powerful edge-AI applications.

The M5Stack LLM-8850 Card is an M.2 M-KEY 2242 AI acceleration module designed for edge devices. It combines a compact 42 mm form factor with the Axera AX8850 SoC, delivering 24 TOPS @ INT8 performance. With simple plug-and-play installation, it allows host devices such as the Raspberry Pi 5, RK3588 boards, and x86 PCs to add multimodal large-model processing and advanced video analysis capabilities.

The card includes an active cooling system with a microturbine fan and CNC-machined aluminium alloy fins. Fan speed is automatically managed by the onboard EC using temperaturecurrent curves, ensuring stable performance even during long-term full-load operation inside enclosed cases, preventing thermal slowdown.

Power delivery is handled by an onboard DCDC + PMIC chain, monitored in real time by the EC to provide power on demand and cooling on demand, which helps maintain overall system stability.

The card supports AXCL Runtime, with C and Python APIs for quick deployment of popular model typesincluding CNNs, Transformers, LLMs, and multimodal models. It supports workloads such as YOLO-v8/v9, CLIP, Whisper, Llama 3.2, Gemma 2, and Qwen 2.5, and also makes use of the AX8850s VPU hardware pipeline for H.264/H.265 8K encoding and decoding, including simultaneous encodedecode, transcoding, scaling, and cropping.

Host devices can access the hardware codec directly through ffmpeg, bridging AI workloads with high-performance video stream processing.

Features

• Ultra-compact form factor: NGFFM.2 M-KEY 2242 size, supports PCIe 2.02 lanes plug-and-play
• High-performance NPU: 24TOPS@INT8, octa-coreCortexA551.7GHzCPU
• Intelligent cooling / power supply: onboard turbofan + CNC aluminium alloy integrated heatsink, EC-monitored temperature-current-speed closed loop
• High-bandwidth memory: 64bitLPDDR4x, 4266Mbps speed, 8GB capacity
• Rich I/O: 1USB3.0, 2USB2.0, 2Gigabit EthernetMAC
• Hardware video engine: 8K@30fps H.264/H.265 encoding, 8K@60fps decoding, supports 32-channel 1080p parallel decoding
• Secure boot & encryption: AES / DES / 3DES / SHA256 hardware security module
• Native AXCL: one-click operation for CNN, Transformer, CLIP, Whisper, Llama3.2, Qwen2.5, InternVL2 full-stack models, supports H.264/H.265 simultaneous encode-decode transcoding.

Specifications

Resources

• Documents
• User Guide

Package Contents

• 1x AI-8850 LLM Acceleration M.2 Module