Raspberry Pi unveiled another product for its flagship single-board computer this week: the AI accelerator module HAT+, designed in collaboration with Hailo, is available in two versions with performance of 13 and 26 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
Image source: raspberrypi.com
The product may seem familiar: last summer, the Raspberry Pi AI Kit was released with the same Hailo-8 accelerator, only now this accelerator is built into the expansion board itself, rather than connected to it via the M.2 interface. Like the SSD presented the day before, the new accelerator is based on PCIe 3.0 – perhaps in one of the upcoming software updates the default PCIe standard will change from version 2 to version 3.
The new Raspberry Pi AI Kit+ comes in two variants: Hailo-8 with 26 TOPS performance and Hailo-8L with 13 TOPS, like the original AI Kit; the older version supports running several neural networks simultaneously. The latest version of Raspberry Pi OS will automatically detect Hailo’s built-in accelerator and make it available in AI apps, including rpicam-apps and Picamera2. The Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ module comes with 16mm high clamps that leave space for active cooling, and a flat cable to connect to PCIe on the computer board. The younger version with 13 TOPS is priced at $70, and for the older version with 26 TOPS you will have to pay $110.