Looking at the state of the original Coral TPU (which was basically abandoned, just like regular other Google stuff), would make me very wary to use this is a long term product.
the coral tpu does what it does and it's not bad at it. The documentation is good , and quite a few people use them practically. They're available readily.
What's upsetting about the state? Continued development?
however, to your point : being google affiliated is a huge red-flag for longevity.
They were completely sold out for 2-3 years (2020 onwards), and Google wiped documentation (https://coral.ai/products/accelerator/ redirects to the main page, which has no reference to the original Coral). I can't tell where there's an official place to buy this. I see some on Amazon, but that might be resold.
Huge amount of drivers, all for 6.12, which is already pretty old. https://github.com/synaptics-astra/linux_6_12-drivers-synapt...
Agreed that that no hardware video encode is pretty damned deflating.
Having such a low power device is incredibly enticing. Thanks for the good details. One random thing I'm kind of excited over, there's 3x I2S audio connections, which has some weird fun use cases (ideally a little field recorder?).
One curious thing, Google's post says they are still trying to finalize the matrix extensions for RISC-V. I'm assuming those simply aren't on these Synaptics chips?