Raspberry Pi Enters the Field of Artificial Intelligence

2024-06-05

With the ongoing AI boom, even microcomputer company Raspberry Pi plans to sell AI chips. This chip is integrated with Raspberry Pi's camera software and can directly run AI-based applications, such as chatbots. Raspberry Pi has partnered with chip manufacturer Hailo to launch an AI kit, which is an add-on device for the Raspberry Pi 5 microcomputer and will run Hailo's Hailo-8L M.2 accelerator. These kits will be sold through the global Raspberry Pi authorized distributor network for $70. Hailo's CEO and co-founder, Orr Danon, stated that their accelerator has "power consumption of less than 2 watts and is passively cooled." This accelerator provides 130 trillion operations per second (TOPS), which is lower than chips designed for AI laptops, such as Intel's 40 TOPS Lunar Lake processor. Most AI applications run in the cloud because they often require a large amount of energy and computing power to function. However, there is a trend to bring AI to portable devices by manufacturing smaller AI models and processors that require less power. This allows laptops and smartphones to run coding assistants or AI-based photo editing applications without the need for API calls. Currently, AI on personal computers and other portable devices is a major trend as many hardware manufacturers seek to profit from the demand for AI. Microsoft has revealed that its laptop partners will release Copilot Plus personal computers with built-in AI features, such as the controversial Recall. AMD has announced its new AI brand, Ryzen processors, stating that their flagship chip can now run generative AI workloads. Nvidia will also provide AI chips in laptops, with their highly sought-after H100 GPU being used for training large language models like GPT-4o.