Raspberry Pi has been shipping new products at a rapid pace lately. This week, the company is adding several new products to its lineup to extend the functionalities of the Raspberry Pi 5.
Raspberry Pi is mostly known for its tiny, cheap, single-board computers that are widely used by hobbyists and schools, as well as industrial and electronics manufacturing companies. The Raspberry Pi 5, the company’s flagship product, features a PCIe 3.0 interface exposed with a 16-pin connector.
The company has been selling M.2 HAT+ extension cards that convert the 16-pin connector to a more traditional M.2 connector. HAT stands for “Hardware Attached on Top”, a cute acronym the company has been using to refer to extension cards that you attach to a regular Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi users have been taking advantage of that M.2 slot to add NVMe SSDs (more on that below) and other add-ons. For instance, Raspberry Pi back in June started selling an AI Kit that’s essentially an M.2 extension card with a neural network inference accelerator from Hailo.
Today, the company is launching a brand new HAT+ add-on board with a built-in Hailo inference accelerator. The Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ comes in 13 and 26 tera-operations per second (TOPS) variants, retailing at $70 and $110 respectively. The 13 TOPS variant features the same module as the one in the existing AI Kit.
You’re not going to train a GPT on a Raspberry Pi, but these AI add-ons are a cost-effective way to perform inference at the edge.
Unlike the M.2 HAT+, the AI HAT+ doesn’t have an M.2 interface. It’s a single package designed for Hailo’s inference modules.
Here’s what the AI HAT+ looks like (left) compared to the M.2 HAT+ when used with the AI Kit (right):
If you’re familiar with PC components, you know that most modern NVMe storage drives also use M.2 connectors. There are different SSD types though, and they come in varying form factors and performance speeds.
For the Raspberry Pi 5, you can use any NVMe SSD in the 2230 and 2242 form factors that are compatible with PCIe 3.0. Off-the-shelf SSDs will work fine with a Raspberry Pi 5 with an M.2 HAT+ extension.
The company is also launching its own branded M.2 NVMe SSDs — the 256GB variant sells for $30 and the 512GB version goes for $45. For context, a 256GB SSD with similar specifications currently costs between $20 and $30 on Amazon.
The company also sells SSD Kit bundles with both an M.2 HAT+ and an SSD in a single box. The 256GB SSD Kit costs $40, while the 512GB one costs $55.
These SSD Kits aren’t going to revolutionize the Raspberry Pi ecosystem, but they are a nice way to make sure you’re buying an SSD that is compatible with the Raspberry Pi 5 and its M.2 HAT+ attachment.