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Was typing in all the info about this and browser crashed, and I'm tired, so I'll post info tomorrow. :-P

sigh - Okay, let me type all this up again.

The best overview I can give on the subject would be to refer you to a LTT video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B635wcdr6-w - which talks about a product from Asus that uses the Dual Edge TPU boards. 200% of the performance for ~ 220% of the total price. TBF this card is better built and will handle being inside a server better but it's overkill for most individuals. The video is interesting and goes into some of the software to utilize the TPUs in image recognition.

The Coral Dual Edge TPU uses what is part of the M.2 slot spec but isn't the same as the ones for SSDs. It's actually the same slot as what's used for wifi/bluetooth on some laptops and motherboards. You can actually plug the module into one! Unfortunately you will probably only be able to access one of the TPUs because most of the time there's only one SATA lane routed to the slot.

To get the cards working on more standard hardware I purchased carrier boards from COOPERATOR on Makerfabs - https://www.makerfabs.com/dual-edge-tpu-adapter-m2-2280-b-m-key.html - which will take one of the TPU modules and plug into the same M.2 slot as an NVME drive. The total cost of the module plus the carrier is roughly the same as one of the single-TPU USB dongles, so twice as much bang for the buck!

You can plug the above into a slot on your motherboard, and this might be worthwhile to start experimenting. If you need more, though, you'll need to do what I did and buy a PCIE card that can take multiple "drives". This raises other issues; those cards mostly have PCIE switches meant to share bandwidth between all the drives, and I wasn't sure the switch would be compatible with the TPUs.

What I did is buy this thing - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C64FVVHY - which is a card that lacks a switch, but instead depends on a chipset featured called "PCIE bifurcation". This feature was introduced with the PCIE v4 spec, though I hear it's available on some v3 motherboards. It's also not guaranteed you'll be able to enable the feature, it has to be turned on in the BIOS. So this is something you'll need to confirm will work with your PC.

No. Only eight lanes are in use, and and they connect via PCIe gen2.

I won't need ten of these, this should be plenty for my few cameras. Not sure what it's going into yet, depends on how things will be set up. If I need a GPU in the system for video decoding I might need something like a threadripper.

Correct. With the carrier cards each dual TPU costs about as much as a single USB TPU.