Sony investment will put AI chips in Raspberry Pi boards

Sony will provide its Aitrios on-chip AI image sensing platform.

Sony's semiconductor division has announced that it is making a "strategic investment" in Raspberry Pi to bring its artificial intelligence technology to a wider market. The idea is to give Raspberry Pi users around the world a development platform for its Aitrios edge computing (on-chip) artificial intelligence platform used for image sensing functions such as facial recognition. .

"We are very pleased to partner with Raspberry Pi Ltd. to bring our Aitrios platform - which supports the development of unique and diverse solutions using our state-of-the-art artificial intelligence devices - to the user community. and Raspberry Pi developers, and provide a one-stop development experience,” said Sony Semiconductor Solutions President and CEO Terushi Shimizu.

The Raspberry Pi 4 and other devices from the company give users PC-like power in a compact form factor. Originally designed as an educational platform to teach robotics, coding, and more, it has become popular as a way for coders to prototype IoT (Internet of Things) and other devices.

The addition of Sony's Aitrios might make it even more useful. Unlike cloud AI, it runs directly on chips (edge ​​computing) to reduce latency, and Sony launched the system for uses such as surveillance, security, etc. Examples cited on a dedicated website include inventory monitoring and retention, customer counting, license plate recognition and "detailed employee analytics". Sony says it maintains privacy by analyzing data strictly on-chip and only sending metadata to the cloud.

Sony is already involved with Raspberry Pi as a "long-standing and valued strategic partner," the company said. It recently provided imaging chips with autofocus capability and helped Raspberry Pi upgrade its manufacturing facility in the UK at the start of the business.