Raspberry Pi releases AI accelerator add-on for Pi 5

Raspberry Pi has announced an AI Kit for the Raspberry Pi 5. It consists of an M.2 HAT+ module on which an 8L-AI accelerator from manufacturer Hailo is pre-mounted. This kit has a suggested retail price of $70.

The AI ​​Kit offers full integration with the Raspberry Pi camera software, allowing this add-on to be used for object detection and image classification, among other things. writes the manufacturer of single-board computers.

The 8L-AI accelerator can achieve 13 tera operations per second, or tops. That is enough to run smaller machine learning models and 'optimized' large language models largely locally, although certain calculations still have to be done via the cloud, the manufacturer warns opposite The Register.

According to Raspberry Pi, the passively cooled SoC consumes a maximum of 5W of energy. At a 'standard load', such as processing a 60fps video, only 1 to 2W is consumed. The module can be connected to the PCIe slot of the Raspberry Pi 5 via a flat ribbon cable. The device has a PCIe 3.0 interface with a single lane. According to Raspberry Pi, the speeds are a maximum of 8GB/s.

The AI ​​Kit is available immediately for $70. The Raspberry Pi 5 was released last September and is listed in the Pricewatch from 64.95 euros for a variant with 4GB. The M.2 HAT+ module is also sold separately for a suggested retail price of $12.