14 ms·

Sony backs Raspberry Pi with fresh funding, access to A.I. chips

jokoon 4y ago
Please add 512mb of flash memory. I won't buy until it has flash memory. Why is that such a difficult thing to have? Smartphones cost less than 70$ and they have more than 2gb. I'm starting to think the rpi isn't led by people who understand computers.
- magios 4y ago
  some of the cm4 variants do have flash memory, 8, 16 and 32gb mmc flash, but those are just as hard to obtain as standard raspberry pis. you use the raspberry pi io board or any of the third party ones to connect the cm4.
squarefoot 4y ago
Let's hope that move won't mark the transition of the RPi ecosystem from partially open to completely closed plus DRM. Some of us have long memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
andrewstuart 4y ago
Raspberry Pi started out being for kids, schools and hobbyists. During the chip shortage Eben Upton made the decision to focus all their manufacturing output on their business and industrial customers. Upton justification was that those companies income depended on Raspberry Pi so that’s where they prioritized their supply. Realistically those companies could have found other technology solutions, designed their systems around other tech. Upton could have given them notice to find other designs so Raspberry Pi could get back to kids and schools. But that never happened. So the realistic outcome is that for years now raspberry pi has been a dedicated supplier of industrial computing systems. Schools, kids and hobbyists are long forgotten. Nothing has changed and raspberry pi continues to pretend it’s about school, kids and hobbyists but it’s just and industrial computer systems company. Raspberry pi is a strange sort of ghost company. It exists, but you haven’t been able to buy their core products for many years now. The maintain a sort of phony facade continuing to market to community and schools and kids which is very strange since the community response is always “great but we can’t buy your stuff”.
- morninglight 4y ago
  [andrewstuart] is exactly on target with his critique. The Raspberry Pi foundation is only using the educational market as a false cover. When the pi-zero family was introduced, it looked like they were being true to their stated goals, but that didn't last long. Furthermore, Sony is the last company I would ever expect to share those goals. Sony has always targeted the high end of the market. They are profit driven, and have NEVER been interested in the low cost educational or hobbyist value of their investments.
  - ngcazz 4y ago
    What do you make of the AIBO line, the Net Yaroze and the PS2 Linux kit then? (Just really curious about your assertion they have no interest in the hobbyist and education markets, since those are some admittedly outdated examples)
    - musicale 4y ago
      IIRC it was the PS3 that advertised Linux on the box (of the launch model at least) and supported the "Other OS" feature until Sony disabled it with a firmware update. ;-(
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  You made me realise that it's time to drop the Raspberry Pi for new projects, much like I decided to drop Android after 13 years of use in favour of an iPhone. Unless Raspberry Pi comes back with a roar in the next year or two, the best hardware platforms will be decommissioned x86 low-power SFF PCs, followed by cheap-ish special-purpose ARM devices if a specific application requires that. Raspberry Pi was the only well-supported, well-priced ARM machine that was truly general-purpose in my eyes.
  - croutonwagon 4y ago
    The Pi isnt bad for certain things. And can still be had for fairly cheap. I put one in my parents house for remote support, some small postfix and NUT/UPS shutdown goodness. I usually just get a canakit on amazon for under 200 bucks and it comes with most of the utilities, cases etc needed to flesh it out. Still thinking of making a Sonos style speaker system in the house with some Pi's and some JBL charge speakers or something which can always be used as a BT speaker and even setup in tandem for stereo. Those things are solid. I use them on the boat, when playing along to songs, even when setting up a projector in the yard for the kids to watch a movie in a "special" setup.
prmoustache 4y ago
What is the definition of an "A.I. chip" ?
- baq 4y ago
  no idea but if you asked me what I would want it to do is tensors for GPT and DL image processing inference and if possible training (so I can at least finetune a pretrained model)
- rwmj 4y ago
  AI inference engines. The learning part is done on big machines in the cloud. The inference part (giving answers) can be done on edge devices. There's a ton of articles listing the competitors, here's one fairly at random: https://www.aiacceleratorinstitute.com/top-20-chips-choice-2022/ https://www.aiacceleratorinstitute.com/top-20-chips-choice-2... (Note the article covers both learning and inference chips.) What's interesting is I can't find out much about Sony's chips.
  - Tepix 4y ago
    On devices like the Nvidia Jetson Nano you can also train models. I think Raspberry Pi will move in this direction. The Jetson Nano has replaced the Raspberry Pis on things like the Donkeycar project. I guess they don't want to become obsolete.
- Goz3rr 4y ago
  Chips with some sort of neural network accelerator or related hardware.
- lfkdev 4y ago
  Depends on the marketing department in question
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    If we're talking about Sony, it's probably vision related A.I. accelerators. Their Alpha cameras depend on them very much. Even my now old A7-III can do amazing things realtime.
mschild 4y ago
If you are trying to purchase on you can try your luck on https://rpilocator.com https://rpilocator.com
mschuster91 4y ago
Sony? Oh god. Excellent hardware, but if their software side is going to be like its cameras I pity anyone having to develop for it.
- fanf2 4y ago
  Since 2012, Raspberry Pi boards are assembled at a Sony factory in Wales. http://www.sonypencoed.co.uk/case-studies/raspberry-pi/ http://www.sonypencoed.co.uk/case-studies/raspberry-pi/
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Yeah, assembly is part of hardware which Sony can do just fine. The current announcement however is about some AI co-processor. Mark my words, if the software side is anything implemented by Sony instead of the community it will be a shitshow.
    - nsteel 4y ago
      I can't imagine anything about this thing will be open so whatever the community produces will be at the mercy of the shit-show firmware/driver Sony provides. Fun times ahead!
- Gys 4y ago
  The problem might be more general? There was a discussion on HN a few months ago about Japanese cultural and software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320669
lnsru 4y ago
I almost quit my day job in 2020 building a product based on Raspberry Pi Compute module 4, it has great form factor. But I didn’t! And it was another proof, that playing safe is not the worst way to do things. What’s alternative!? As an electrical engineer I designed a Spartan 7 FPGA based board with same form factor as compute module 4 for replacement in my system. Nowadays Spartan 7 chips are available again at Mouser and Digikey. I ready don’t need a Raspberry Pi with A.I. chip, because I can’t buy even a regular one.
- zokier 4y ago
  Arm based system-on-modules in general are widely available from all sorts of vendors, especially for commercial/industrial use. Something like Spartan usually is in a different league, being a fpga instead of plain soc
  - lnsru 4y ago
    Could you, please, recommend something? I heard, the NXP i.MX 8 series should be good.

Please add 512mb of flash memory. I won't buy until it has flash memory. Why is that such a difficult thing to have? Smartphones cost less than 70$ and they have more than 2gb. I'm starting to think the rpi isn't led by people who understand computers.

magios 4y ago
some of the cm4 variants do have flash memory, 8, 16 and 32gb mmc flash, but those are just as hard to obtain as standard raspberry pis. you use the raspberry pi io board or any of the third party ones to connect the cm4.

squarefoot 4y ago

Let's hope that move won't mark the transition of the RPi ecosystem from partially open to completely closed plus DRM. Some of us have long memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

andrewstuart 4y ago

Raspberry Pi started out being for kids, schools and hobbyists. During the chip shortage Eben Upton made the decision to focus all their manufacturing output on their business and industrial customers. Upton justification was that those companies income depended on Raspberry Pi so that’s where they prioritized their supply. Realistically those companies could have found other technology solutions, designed their systems around other tech. Upton could have given them notice to find other designs so Raspberry Pi could get back to kids and schools. But that never happened. So the realistic outcome is that for years now raspberry pi has been a dedicated supplier of industrial computing systems. Schools, kids and hobbyists are long forgotten. Nothing has changed and raspberry pi continues to pretend it’s about school, kids and hobbyists but it’s just and industrial computer systems company. Raspberry pi is a strange sort of ghost company. It exists, but you haven’t been able to buy their core products for many years now. The maintain a sort of phony facade continuing to market to community and schools and kids which is very strange since the community response is always “great but we can’t buy your stuff”.

morninglight 4y ago
[andrewstuart] is exactly on target with his critique. The Raspberry Pi foundation is only using the educational market as a false cover. When the pi-zero family was introduced, it looked like they were being true to their stated goals, but that didn't last long. Furthermore, Sony is the last company I would ever expect to share those goals. Sony has always targeted the high end of the market. They are profit driven, and have NEVER been interested in the low cost educational or hobbyist value of their investments.
- ngcazz 4y ago
  What do you make of the AIBO line, the Net Yaroze and the PS2 Linux kit then? (Just really curious about your assertion they have no interest in the hobbyist and education markets, since those are some admittedly outdated examples)
  - musicale 4y ago
    IIRC it was the PS3 that advertised Linux on the box (of the launch model at least) and supported the "Other OS" feature until Sony disabled it with a firmware update. ;-(
selfhoster11 4y ago
You made me realise that it's time to drop the Raspberry Pi for new projects, much like I decided to drop Android after 13 years of use in favour of an iPhone. Unless Raspberry Pi comes back with a roar in the next year or two, the best hardware platforms will be decommissioned x86 low-power SFF PCs, followed by cheap-ish special-purpose ARM devices if a specific application requires that. Raspberry Pi was the only well-supported, well-priced ARM machine that was truly general-purpose in my eyes.
- croutonwagon 4y ago
  The Pi isnt bad for certain things. And can still be had for fairly cheap. I put one in my parents house for remote support, some small postfix and NUT/UPS shutdown goodness. I usually just get a canakit on amazon for under 200 bucks and it comes with most of the utilities, cases etc needed to flesh it out. Still thinking of making a Sonos style speaker system in the house with some Pi's and some JBL charge speakers or something which can always be used as a BT speaker and even setup in tandem for stereo. Those things are solid. I use them on the boat, when playing along to songs, even when setting up a projector in the yard for the kids to watch a movie in a "special" setup.

prmoustache 4y ago

What is the definition of an "A.I. chip" ?

baq 4y ago
no idea but if you asked me what I would want it to do is tensors for GPT and DL image processing inference and if possible training (so I can at least finetune a pretrained model)
rwmj 4y ago
AI inference engines. The learning part is done on big machines in the cloud. The inference part (giving answers) can be done on edge devices. There's a ton of articles listing the competitors, here's one fairly at random: https://www.aiacceleratorinstitute.com/top-20-chips-choice-2022/ https://www.aiacceleratorinstitute.com/top-20-chips-choice-2... (Note the article covers both learning and inference chips.) What's interesting is I can't find out much about Sony's chips.
- Tepix 4y ago
  On devices like the Nvidia Jetson Nano you can also train models. I think Raspberry Pi will move in this direction. The Jetson Nano has replaced the Raspberry Pis on things like the Donkeycar project. I guess they don't want to become obsolete.
Goz3rr 4y ago
Chips with some sort of neural network accelerator or related hardware.
lfkdev 4y ago
Depends on the marketing department in question
- bayindirh 4y ago
  If we're talking about Sony, it's probably vision related A.I. accelerators. Their Alpha cameras depend on them very much. Even my now old A7-III can do amazing things realtime.

mschild 4y ago

If you are trying to purchase on you can try your luck on https://rpilocator.com https://rpilocator.com

mschuster91 4y ago

Sony? Oh god. Excellent hardware, but if their software side is going to be like its cameras I pity anyone having to develop for it.

fanf2 4y ago
Since 2012, Raspberry Pi boards are assembled at a Sony factory in Wales. http://www.sonypencoed.co.uk/case-studies/raspberry-pi/ http://www.sonypencoed.co.uk/case-studies/raspberry-pi/
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Yeah, assembly is part of hardware which Sony can do just fine. The current announcement however is about some AI co-processor. Mark my words, if the software side is anything implemented by Sony instead of the community it will be a shitshow.
  - nsteel 4y ago
    I can't imagine anything about this thing will be open so whatever the community produces will be at the mercy of the shit-show firmware/driver Sony provides. Fun times ahead!
Gys 4y ago
The problem might be more general? There was a discussion on HN a few months ago about Japanese cultural and software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320669

lnsru 4y ago

I almost quit my day job in 2020 building a product based on Raspberry Pi Compute module 4, it has great form factor. But I didn’t! And it was another proof, that playing safe is not the worst way to do things. What’s alternative!? As an electrical engineer I designed a Spartan 7 FPGA based board with same form factor as compute module 4 for replacement in my system. Nowadays Spartan 7 chips are available again at Mouser and Digikey. I ready don’t need a Raspberry Pi with A.I. chip, because I can’t buy even a regular one.

zokier 4y ago
Arm based system-on-modules in general are widely available from all sorts of vendors, especially for commercial/industrial use. Something like Spartan usually is in a different league, being a fpga instead of plain soc
- lnsru 4y ago
  Could you, please, recommend something? I heard, the NXP i.MX 8 series should be good.