Sony Semiconductor sinks Simoleans into Raspberry Pi to advance edge AI

Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation has revealed it’s made a “strategic investment” in Raspberry Pi Ltd, the designer of popular single board computers. The brief announcement from the Japanese giant’s semiconductor limb features president and CEO Terushi Shimizu stating “We are very pleased to be partnering with …

[Ramis101]

Fan of Pi not AI

“we expect to build a variety of products .......

Please just Build some Pi's!!! Farnell (uk) are still showing an ETA of December for an RPi 4 8gb

I have Zero's on back order & not due until June. This really puts a crimp on development dude!!!

[[e-mail]]

Re: Fan of Pi not AI

Yep any PIs available would be nice. I found treasure the other day, an old RPI3 at the bottom of a box which has now been repurposed.

As for new PIs, all I want is an M.2 SSD interface and moah/betterer cpu-idge so it can be properly used as a secondary desktop. Cheap and/or refurbed mini-PCs are an option but I'd rather stick with RPIs and lower power usage. Oh well, maybe next PI day.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Fan of Pi not AI

If we're doing hardware requests, SATA please, preferably multiple ports. I know it's old school, but for putting a NAS together it's great.

[David 132]

Re: Fan of Pi not AI

Or alternatively a high-bandwidth USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 port, so that the Pi can be interfaced to (and maybe even stashed inside) a commodity N-bay JBOD box to achieve a similar result.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Fan of Pi not AI

What do you want: fast or cheap? To ensure it can provide cheap devices, RPi has to wait for those prepared to pay more to get served first.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Fan of Pi not AI

@[e-mail]

"I found treasure the other day, an old RPI3 at the bottom of a box which has now been repurposed."

So what did you repurpose your box into?

[[e-mail]]

Re: Fan of Pi not AI

HAT

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Fan of Pi not AI

A HATbox?

[dharmOS]

What does this Sony co-processor do?

Will the AI be for training or inference? Is it like the Google Coral USB TPU that 2TFlops of INT8 maths for inference on already trained models, or will it do more?

https://coral.ai/products/accelerator

[werdsmith]

Re: What does this Sony co-processor do?

I believe it’s about inference capable camera sensor modules using existing models, not for training models.

It’s a game that Raspberry or anyone can’t afford to ignore, and currently led by NVidia with their Jetson range.

[Anonymous Coward]

Raspberry Spy

Would it be wrong to speculate that taking on an ex surveillance cop was just the first step towards Raspberry Pi jumping aboard the facial recognition bandwagon?

https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/09/rpi_maker_in_residence_police

There could be knighthoods all round for services rendered to the post-brexit Big Brother ambitions of the current government.

[Anonymous Coward]

Favourite PI usage

My favourite pi usage is still the HVAC hack Eliiot used in Mr.Robot.

Maybe the Sony/pi collaboration should include a new TV series as well.