The Raspberry Pi 5 Gets an AI Upgrade 47
Today, Raspberry Pi introduced a new kit that adds AI functionality to the Raspberry Pi 5. ZDNet reports: The Raspberry Pi AI kit combines an M.2-format Hailo 8L AI accelerator with the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ to create a powerful yet power-efficient solution. The Hailo-8L NPU (Neural Processing Unit) chip, capable of 13 trillion operations per second (TOPS), is built into an M.2 2242 form factor module that attaches to the M.2 HAT+. When connected to a Raspberry Pi 5 board running the latest Raspberry Pi OS, the NPU is automatically available for AI computing tasks. The AI module also has direct access to the Raspberry Pi's camera software stack and works with both first-party and third-party cameras.
The NPU allows the Raspberry Pi 5 to perform AI tasks such as object and facial recognition, human pose analysis, and more. Using an NPU frees up the Raspberry Pi 5's CPU, allowing it to focus on other tasks, making your projects more efficient and powerful. The Raspberry Pi AI kit is also compatible with the Raspberry Pi Active Cooler, ensuring optimal performance without overheating. Additionally, you can purchase a clear protective layer to prevent damage to the board, giving you peace of mind while working on your projects. The AI kit is priced at $70. It's available from Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers, including PiHut, PiShop.us, and CanaKit.
The NPU allows the Raspberry Pi 5 to perform AI tasks such as object and facial recognition, human pose analysis, and more. Using an NPU frees up the Raspberry Pi 5's CPU, allowing it to focus on other tasks, making your projects more efficient and powerful. The Raspberry Pi AI kit is also compatible with the Raspberry Pi Active Cooler, ensuring optimal performance without overheating. Additionally, you can purchase a clear protective layer to prevent damage to the board, giving you peace of mind while working on your projects. The AI kit is priced at $70. It's available from Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers, including PiHut, PiShop.us, and CanaKit.
Sellouts (Score:4, Insightful)
They are supposed to be reducing the cost of computing instead they're increasing it. The Raspberry Pi (without this AI kit) has been increased from $35 to $70, with nothing material to justify the price increase. If they had bumped it up to $70 and included a power supply, memory card, mouse, and 15 inch display .. then yeah .. I would say they justified it. They increased it to $70 with an unnecessary speed increase. They've sold out on their mission. It's 2024, we should be able to have a usable sub-$100 dollar desktop (with display, mouse/keyboard, monitor, case, etc) by now.
Re:Sellouts (Score:5, Informative)
The Pi 4 is still $35, so if you don't need the speed or new features there isn't any change.
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Is it available now? Last I checked it was sold out almost everywhere.
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As I type Adafruit has 1, 2, and 4GB versions in stock.
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The supply chain is back to normal and they are available everywhere again.
https://rpilocator.com/?countr... [rpilocator.com]
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Is it available now? Last I checked it was sold out almost everywhere.
I just typed "Raspberry Pi {country I live in}" into Google and followed the first 5 links. All models of the Pi 4 are available at all the stores. You must have last checked a long time ago.
lolwut (Score:1)
"They increased it to $70 with an unnecessary speed increase." Is that how we view technology now? It's good enough and it doesn't need to go any faster? Aside from the fact that previous Raspberry PIs didn't have a PCIe bus, so the new one isn't just faster, it allows you to include an nmve drive or (as this story talks about) an AI accelerator. If you really like the older models you can still buy them for the same price you know.
When the Raspberry Pi 3 came out the McDonalds cheeseburger cost $1.28 or so
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The thing is, technology has always ventured to try to reduce the cost, increase accessibility, and reduce the barrier of entry. That was the culture we had since the 1950s. I hope we're not witnessing a reverse trend. It means we've handed the reigns over to finance idiots instead of technologists and engineers. That's why burger and housing prices increased, btw. They've rigged the housing markets to ensure it's difficult to build new units thereby securing demand by choking off supply. I'm not pissed bec
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Re:lolwut (Score:5, Informative)
I am grumpy because raspberry pi gave up on trying to make computing more accessible.
You can purchase a Raspberry Pi with multiple features and speeds from $4 to $80. You want to learn programming, hardware interfaces, wireless networking, etc, then purchase the $6 Raspberry Pi Pico W. Just because the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB is $80 doesn't mean it's the only, or even best, choice to begin with.
https://www.pishop.us/product-... [pishop.us]
Your argument is like complaining nobody can learn to become an automobile mechanic because a Lamborghini Huracan starts at over $250K.
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The Picos are a microcontroller and aren't directly comparable to the mainstream Pis
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Sure, and it's just fine for learning the things the GP specified. It's almost as if that's why they specifically mentioned those things before the recommendation.
Re:Different power supplies for each model (Score:5, Interesting)
The power requirements between each of the RPi 3, 4 and 5 also changed so you can't use the same power supplies either, even if you bought the voltage boosted official ones. The RPi 5 is up to 27 watts now!
Oh, it's way worse than that. The Raspberry Pi 5 will only negotiate 5V over USB PD. It isn't 27 watts. It's 25 watts on a specially designed 27W supply. It's 25 watts because 5A is the absolute maximum that USB Power Delivery will allow it to negotiate, and it cannot handle any input voltage other than 5V!
That means that if you don't want to have to worry about undervoltage causing crashes and reboots, not only do you have to have a special power supply — the vast majority of USB-C power supplies will NOT output 5A at 5V, including even Apple's 96W power supply — but you also need a cable that's rated for 5A, which is more than the vast majority of cables are rated for.
So from the original Raspberry PI to the Pi 5, the product went from being an easy-to-use device that you can power with any power supply to this highly specialized, highly nonstandard device that you can basically only power with 250W 3-port USB-C power supplies and the official Raspberry Pi power supply, and that's about it.
In fact the official Pi power supply uses highly nonstandard 17 AWG power wires in the power supply to make it work at all. Realistically, there's almost zero chance that any third-party power supply or power cable will be able to adequately power this thing if it starts drawing 5A.
How they managed to screw up USB Power Delivery not once, but twice — the first revs of the Pi 4 could not negotiate with a lot of USB-C power supplies because they incorrectly used a single resistor for CC1 and CC2 instead of separate resistors — is beyond my comprehension. Everybody else is doing it right, doing 27W at 9V.
The 5V decision has other ramifications besides the extra cable requirements. Most USB-C power cables are 22 AWG or smaller, and some are as high as 30 AWG. At 5V, a 5A load over a 22-gauge 3-foot copper wire would have a 9.7% voltage drop, resulting in an output voltage of something like 4.5V on the other end. I'm amazed this thing even boots. And that means almost a tenth of your power is being wasted heating the wire between your power supply and the Raspberry Pi.
This is, frankly, a garbage design.
If Raspberry Pi had done USB Power Delivery like a sane, competent engineer would, then this device would have requested 9V at a 3A load. When run over that same 22-gauge wire, it would produce a 3.2% voltage drop, resulting in 8.72V on the other end. You'd be wasting one third as much power. Or it could request 15V at 2A, for a 1.3% voltage drop, and 14.81V on the other end. Either of those approaches makes sense. 5V does not.
At 30 AWG (common even for some 5A-rated USB cables), the voltage drop is more than 3V, i.e. you get 1.9V out the other side. There's no way that a Pi will function at all while drawing anywhere close to 5A at 5V over a lot of standard USB cables, including many that are rated for 5A. Zero chance whatsoever. They're not rated for usefully carrying 5A at 5V. They're rated for allowing a 5A draw without melting. The assumption is that if you're drawing 5A, you're doing it at 20V or even 48V, where the voltage drop doesn't make a big difference in the grand scheme of things.
No one in their right minds asks for 5A at 5V. The moment they started requiring Power Delivery because they needed to draw too much amperage for standard USB, any hope of using dumb USB power supplies went out the window, and at that point, they should have revisited the 5V design decision. They didn't, and now we're stuck with this horrendously energy-inefficient hardware until the Raspberry Pi 6 — presumably four years from now, if the last one is any indication.
Literally everybody else is doing USB PD correctly except Raspberry Pi. I would not recommend the Pi 5 to anyone for any reason
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They should have stuck with barrel connector power supplies. The whole Micro-USB and USB Type C situation over the years with the Raspberry Pi has been an unprecedented clusterfcuk.
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They should have stuck with barrel connector power supplies. The whole Micro-USB and USB Type C situation over the years with the Raspberry Pi has been an unprecedented clusterfcuk.
Barrel connectors are solid, yes, but then you'll need a power supply that's specific to that hardware. The whole point of using.a standard connector is so that you can use power supplies that you already have lying around. USB-C really is the right connector to use at this point. It just needs to act like a typical USB-C device, negotiating the highest input voltage that the charger supports, rather than trying to act like a barrel connector with a fixed voltage. :-)
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Or they could do what the NanoPC-T4 did... 12V on a 5.5x2.1mm barrel connector. This is completely bog-standard. There is no need for a PSU "that's specific to that hardware."
the Odroid-M1 and Odroid-N2 take the same connector.
I'm tempted to buy a NanoPC-T6. or 3.
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>> would not recommend the Pi 5 to anyone for any reason
Your complaints are valid but the official power supply is cheap, and the Pi 5 works just fine with it. The 5 is a considerably more powerful machine than the 4 in many ways. Most people who have use for that (like myself) will encounter no problems with the USB amperage issue.
So I recommend the Pi 5 for several reasons. I do have some Pi 4's that I use in situations where expense is a factor and that don't require the extra compute horsepower,
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The 5 is a considerably more powerful machine than the 4 in many ways. Most people who have use for that (like myself) will encounter no problems with the USB amperage issue.
Yeah, but on the flip side, the GPIO compatibility story, last I checked, was problematic enough that you could just as easily move to something like a Rock Pi 5B, which is something like 1.6x as fast in some tests, has four additional low-power cores to save energy when you're not doing CPU-heavy tasks, AND negotiates USB-C PD in a more sensible fashion (up to 20V). It costs more, of course, but you get what you pay for.
Or if you're going to get something that doesn't really take advantage of USB PD, you
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I largely agree with you that the RaspberryPi brand is a bit overblown. The main thing is that the support & community for it is pretty good. But that has lead to a form of vendor lock in, or at least severe brand recognition.
Where does the lock-in figure? Certain libraries locking themselves to the RaspberryPi in one way or another when other hardware like the Libre Potato can do most of the same tricks. To the point where Libre Computer had to make it possible to boot Raspbian on the Potato rather tha
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>> struggling to understand what niche this is supposed to fill
I'm thinking the board is just an adapter for someone's TPU. Not a particularly big deal but an interesting development for the Pi.
My work with the Pi boards has to do with machine vision, and the Pi's have some very useful hardware and software for that purpose which appears to be unique in their class. I can get surprisingly good image recognition on a board that costs $35 (plus tax and shipping etc) even without dedicated peripheral har
Re:Sellouts (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sellouts (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are just looking for a hobby kit which is still pretty capable, there is RPi4 with 2GB RAM available in many places.
For example:
https://www.digikey.com/en/pro... [digikey.com]
Listed at $45 at the time of checking and "In-Stock: 2,783"
If that is still expensive, there is the "Raspberry Pi 3 Model B" at $35, and the "Nano" ones at even more affordable prices.
What happened was people started using these as full fledged desktop replacements. The latest ones has up to 8GB of RAM, PCIe/nvme support, much more powerful CPUs and GPUs and ability to run latest Linux distributions.
Of course that is going to be expensive.
Re: Sellouts (Score:2)
You can have a sub 100$ desktop all day long it may not be new but it will probably run circles around a pi5
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That's used. How can schools with low budget, especially in developing countries, purchase those at scale?
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schools with low budget, especially in developing countries, aren't buying Pi at scale.
also "developing country" is a stupid term nowadays. China is still considered a "developing country".
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So, instead, some rural school district in Georgia got a bunch of them and were glad to get them, the teacher was going to pay the shipping out of her own pocket to get them because the sc
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moving goalpost, the original stament
It's 2024, we should be able to have a usable sub-$100 dollar desktop (with display, mouse/keyboard, monitor, case, etc) by now.
you can all you want, then you changed the requirements
That's used. How can schools with low budget, especially in developing countries, purchase those at scale?
I dont fuckin know, go online and get a pallet of used computers? https://www.govdeals.com/asset... [govdeals.com]
How were they going to afford rasberry pi's with all the accessories in the first place? its not like they have ever been plentiful in their entire existence
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The Raspberry Pi (without this AI kit) has been increased from $35 to $70, with nothing material to justify the price increase.
The $70 model has more RAM than the previous Windows laptop I was issued for work. Saying there's nothing material to justify the price increase is just plain stupid. You don't *have* to buy fancy fast stuff. The previous models are still manufactured for a reason.
Re: Sellouts (Score:2)
Not only that but they got rid of the composite video output. If you are retro gaming on an actual CRT, the Pi5 is not for you.
And yes I do have a 36in 480i Trinitron . It's mostly there to fill the cabinet spot. Would look weird without it.
I did play with Retropie and Recalbox. Could never get past over scan issues in the Pi video drivers. Only 60% of the image was visible.
That said, Central computers near me has a Pi5 for $59.99 .
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That's why many of us have moved to the Orange Pi line [orangepi.org] for non-AI applications.
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The Pi 5 is a lot faster. It's a pretty "material" justification. If you don't think so, get a Pi 4, 3, or 1, all of which are still being produced and fully supported. Or get a Zero 2 which is $15.
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You really only have to look at the picture of the HAT to see why. The Official M.2 HAT follows the official HAT mechanical specification [github.com]. Within that mechanical bound (56.5 x 65 mm) a 2242 is the largest you can fit. In other words: they are following their o
Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
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Why not use two Pi5's instead? (Score:2)
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The processing power doesn't seem like much more than what a Pi5 itself can do. Is the interconnect that much faster than Ethernet?
A bit, yes. It's only a single lane of PCIe, but that's still 5 gigabits per second bidirectionally (full duplex).
Re: Why not use two Pi5's instead? (Score:2)
Well, the version of Ethernet I use at home is 10GBASE-T. However my Pi4 can't hope to reach that speed. I tried Realtek 2.5GBASE-T NICs and they were just too unstable to withstand even a 1hr iperf3 test.
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Well, the version of Ethernet I use at home is 10GBASE-T. However my Pi4 can't hope to reach that speed. I tried Realtek 2.5GBASE-T NICs and they were just too unstable to withstand even a 1hr iperf3 test.
Unstable in what way? In theory, it should be able to sustain roughly 2.5 gigabit most of the time, assuming you aren't using the other USB ports (because a single PCIe lane's bandwidth is shared across all the USB ports).
I'm assuming, of course, that you're using a switch that supports flow control. Otherwise, yeah, you could run into problems if one end is pushing 2.5 gigabit and the other end can't keep up for any reason (whether because of bandwidth sharing, thermal throttling on the CPU, or too much
Re: Why not use two Pi5's instead? (Score:2)
Unstable as in, stops transferring any bytes until physically unplugged/plugged back in, or reboot. Happens on a Linux PC too, not just on the Pi.
Pretty sure it's a driver issue.
Switch supports flow control.
Beaglebone AI-64 (Score:3)
I kinda like this one: https://www.mouser.com/new/bea... [mouser.com] . In addition to the Linux base, it also has six Cortex-R5F MCUs at up to 1GHz, and two C66x floating-point DSP, if you want to combine some Linux and real-time. By the time you buy a Pi5 and this hat, you're almost to the AI-64, anyway.
Careful (Score:1)
Use in the wild (Score:3)
versus the Coral Edge TPU (Score:2)
I'm curious to know how this stacks up against the Coral Edge TPU.
https://coral.ai/products/ [coral.ai]
I've got the USB version of the Coral ($60) but there are also a couple of M.2 versions that sell for $25. There are a number of ready-made models for it that recognize dozens of objects and you can create your own models or modify existing ones. The API lets you just submit images from the camera (or a file) and you get a list of recognition results back in about 8ms. That's more than fast enough to keep up with th