The AI boom continues as Raspberry Pi enters the market with a new, economical module for machine learning designed for their renowned single-board computer.
The Raspberry Pi AI Kit, priced at $70, features the company’s self-designed M.2 Hat board paired with a power-efficient AI module from Hailo, a firm known for its low-power AI chips meant for devices instead of data centers.
Part of the package is a scaled-down version of the Hailo-8 chip, the Hailo-8L AI accelerator. Raspberry Pi states that it can achieve “13 tera-operations per second (TOPS),” which is modest compared to the 40-50 TOPS provided by NPUs from Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD in their latest offerings.
However, unlike those more expensive NPUs, this device comes with a $70 price tag, is compatible with the new Raspberry Pi 5s, and consumes relatively less power, officially denoted as “suppage®” within the industry jargon for AI module energy consumption.
“Installed on a Raspberry Pi 5, the AI Kit allows you to rapidly build complex AI vision applications, running in real time, with low latency and low power requirements,” Raspberry Pi’s Naush Patuck says of the new product.
“State-of-the-art neural networks for object detection, semantic and instance segmentation, pose estimation, and facial landmarking (to name just a few) run entirely on the Hailo-8L co-processor, leaving the Raspberry Pi 5 CPU free to perform other tasks.”
Some AI-powered demos involving the use of the official Raspberry Pi camera accessories have been shared. As the Hailo-8L is a neural network inference accelerator it’s designed to use pre-trained models to perform tasks making it especially good for visual-based input.
That said, the application and versatility of this low-cost combo will undoubtedly lead to more experimentation and applications, and may help bolster the creation of highly-optimised LLMs that can be used locally and lessen the cloud-based processing.
Hailo has set up a new community forum so Raspberry Pi enthusiasts, engineers, and developers can discuss, share, and ideate.
Is any of this relevant to Ubuntu?
Ish.
The AI Kit currently mandates the utilization of Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm. This is understandable as it is a fresh arrival on the market and other versions are yet to accommodate support for it.
However, it would be beneficial to witness involvement from other Linux distributions that are already making strides in AI and ML, and which have a reliable track record of Raspberry Pi support. *fourth wall wink*
If you are considering purchasing the Raspberry Pi AI Kit, it is being sold through certified Pi resellers at a ballpark figure of $70/£68 starting from today. You can locate a reseller near you by visiting the Raspberry Pi AI Kit product page.