Power Estimation and Energy Efficiency of AI Accelerators on Embedded Systems

The rapid expansion of IoT devices poses new challenges for AI-driven services, particularly in terms of energy consumption. Although cloud-based AI processing has been the dominant approach, its high energy consumption calls for more energy-efficient alternatives. Edge computing offers an approach for reducing both latency and energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a methodology for estimating the power consumption of AI accelerators on an embedded edge device. Through experimental evaluations involving GPU- and Edge TPU-based platforms, the proposed method demonstrated estimation errors below 8%. The estimation errors were partly due to unaccounted power consumption from main memory and storage access. The proposed approach provides a foundation for more reliable energy management in AI-powered edge computing systems.