Understanding energy efficiency of AI deployments in IoT-driven smart cities

The pervasive adoption of AI and AIoT applications at the network edge presents both opportunities and challenges for smart cities. With a focus on the energy efficiency of AI in urban environments, this paper provides a systematic comparative analysis of representative edge hardware platforms, i.e., embedded GPUs, FPGAs, and ultra-low-power microcontroller-/sensor-class devices, assessing their suitability for AI workloads in IoT-driven smart city infrastructures. The evaluation, based on direct characterization of diverse neural networks and relevant datasets, quantifies computational performance and energy behavior through inference latency, throughput, and energy/per inference measurements. Across the evaluated network–board pairs, the measured inference power spans several orders of magnitude, ranging from 0.1–10 mW for ultra-low-power Intelligent Sensor Processing Units (ISPUs) up to 1–10 W for embedded GPUs, highlighting the wide design space between the least and most power-demanding configurations. Results indicate that embedded GPUs provide a favorable performance-to-power ratio for computationally intensive workloads, while MCU/ISPU-class solutions, despite throughput limitations, offer compelling advantages in ultra-low-power scenarios when combined with quantization and pruning, making them well-suited for distributed sensing and actuation typical of smart city deployments. Overall, this comparative analysis guides hardware selection for heterogeneous, sustainable AI-enabled urban services.