Raspberry Pi has introduced a brand new add-on for Raspberry Pi 5 customers seeking to experiment with on-device machine studying and synthetic intelligence (ML and AI) workloads: the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+, developed in partnership with Hailo and providing as much as 26 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at INT8 precision.
“The Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ is an add-on board with a built-in Hailo AI accelerator for Raspberry Pi 5,” the corporate says of its newest {hardware} launch. “It gives an accessible, cost-effective, and power-efficient approach to combine high-performance AI. Discover purposes together with course of management, safety, dwelling automation, and robotics.”
The Raspberry Pi 5 now has as much as 26 TOPS of INT8 compute at its disposal, due to the brand new Raspberry Pi AI HAT+. (📷: Raspberry Pi)
The Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ follows the launch of the Raspberry Pi AI Equipment again in June. Developed, like the brand new AI HAT+, in partnership with low-power on-device AI specialist Hailo, the AI Equipment bundled a Hailo-8L M.2 accelerator board with a Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ — extra generally used to attach high-speed Non-Risky Reminiscence Specific (NVMe) drives to the Raspberry Pi 5. The brand new AI HAT+, although, is a fully-integrated design: the accelerator chip is soldered straight on the board, relatively than utilizing an M.2 module and provider.
There’s additionally been a lift in efficiency: the bottom mannequin of Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ makes use of the identical Hailo-8L chip as the unique Raspberry Pi AI Equipment, providing 13 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of INT8-precision compute; the top-end mannequin, in the meantime, strikes to the Hailo-8, which affords twice the efficiency at 26 TOPS.
Set up is simple: the HAT+ board sits atop of the Raspberry Pi 5, utilizing spacers that present sufficient room for a Raspberry Pi Energetic Cooler beneath, and connects to the 40-pin general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header with a pass-through connector and to the Raspberry Pi 5’s PCI Specific lane by way of a flat versatile circuit (FFC). That is used for the information connection, giving the AI HAT+ a high-speed PCI Specific Gen. 3 lane for max throughput — a step above the standard Gen. 2 for which the PCIe lane is rated, although Raspberry Pi tells us it is absolutely examined on the greater throughput.
The brand new Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ replaces the sooner AI Equipment, which used the M.2 add-in board model of the Hailo-8L accelerator. (📷: Raspberry Pi)
Software program for the AI HAT+ has already been built-in into the newest Raspberry Pi OS Linux distribution, the corporate says: as soon as related, the accelerator is detected robotically and made accessible to the system for compute acceleration. For pc imaginative and prescient work, help has been added to the Raspberry Pi digital camera software program stack — permitting the accelerator for use for post-processing work on any suitable Digicam Module, relatively than simply the brand new Raspberry Pi AI Digicam Module with its built-in accelerator.
The Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ is out there to order from the corporate’s official resellers now, priced at $70 for the Hailo-8L 13 TOPS variant and $110 for the Hailo-8 26 TOPS mannequin.
