8 ms·
I think Raspberry lost the magic of the older Pis, they lost that sense of purpose. They basically created a niche with the first Pis, now they're just jumping
by buran77 9mo ago
I think Raspberry lost the magic of the older Pis, they lost that sense of purpose. They basically created a niche with the first Pis, now they're just jumping into segments that others created and are already filled to the brim with perhaps even more qualified competition.
Are they seeing a worthwhile niche for the tinkerers (or businesses?) who want to run local LLMs with middling performance but still need full set of GPIOs in a small package? Maybe. But maybe this is just Raspberry jumping on the bandwagon.
I don't blame them for looking to expand into new segments, the business needs to survive. But these efforts just look a bit aimless to me. I "blame" them for not having another "Raspberry Pi moment".
P.S. I can maybe see Frigate and similar solutions driving the adoption for these, like they boosted Coral TPU sales. Not sure if that's enough of a push to make it successful. The hat just doesn't have any of the unique value proposition that kickstarted the Raspberry wave.
- ulnarkressty 9mo agoThat niche was long taken over by cheap Chinese SBCs, so they have to innovate somehow. Their only advantage that remains is the community.
- mschuster91 9mo agoThe thing with the Chinese SBCs is that (like every other player in the embedded world) they don't give a flying fuck about upstreaming their code to the Linux kernel. Of course, Raspberry Pi just like everyone else has their custom patches, but at least to my knowledge you can use a straight Linux kernel and still have a running system.
- ChromaticPanic 9mo agoOr just updates in general. Need documentation? Good luck.
- joe_mamba 9mo agoYep. RPi foundation lost the plot a long time ago. The original RPi was in a league of its own when it launched since nothing like it existed and it was cheap. But now if I want some low power linux PC replacement with display output, for the price of the latest RPi 5, I can buy on the used market a ~2018 laptop with a 15W quad core CPU, 8GB RAM, 256 NVME and 1080p IPS display, that's orders of magnitude more capable. And if I want a battery powered embedded ARM device for GPIO over WIFI, I can get an ESP32 clone, that's orders of magnitude cheaper. Now RPi at sticker price is only good for commercial users since it's still cheaper than the dedicated industrial embedded boards, which I think is the new market the RPI company caters to. I haven't seen any embedded product company that hasn't incorporate RPis in its products they ship, or at least in their lab/dev/testing stage, so if you can sell your entire production stock to industrial users who will pay top dollar, why bother making less money selling to consumers, just thank them for all the fish. Jensen Huang would approve.
- haunter 9mo agoNot just laptops but the used enterprise micro PCs from Dell, HP, and Lenovo. All the same small form factor with very low TDP You can have up to 32 or 64 GB RAMs depending on the CPU, dual or even triple disks if you want a NAS etc.
- joe_mamba 9mo agoyeah, depends on what the used market looks like where you live. Here I see way more laptops for sale for cheap than those enterprise thin clients. And the thin clients when they are for sale tend to have their SSDs ripped out by IT for data security, so then it's a hassle to go out and buy and extra SSD, compared to just buying a used laptop that already comes with display , keyboard, etc.
- Mashimo 9mo agoI have seen quite a few the size of a Mac Studio / Intel Nuc, what are the device called that are the size of a pi?
- qsera 9mo ago
- TazeTSchnitzel 9mo agoThe Raspberry Pi probably still has the advantage of an actually robust firmware/software ecosystem? The problem with SBCs has always been that the software situation is awful. That was the Raspberry Pi's real innovation: Raspbian and a commitment to openness.
- vachina 9mo ago> The problem with SBCs has always been that the software situation is awful Awful how? A SBC can take advantage of many software written from the dawn of x86.
- sam_lowry_ 9mo agox86 SBCs are niche, and ARM or RISC SBCs are too complex to figure out the boot process and the drivers for an average tinkerer.
- cbm-vic-20 9mo agoFragmentation in the non-x86 world really hurts adoption. RPi presents a very well documented configuration that can be used as a target for development. RISC-V is going through this exact same problem right now. All of the current implementations have terrible documentation, and tailoring Linux for each of these is proving to be difficult. All of these vendors include on-board devices that have terrible doc and software support.
- bitwize 9mo agoARM has a mitigation for this called SystemReady. It's basically "does your board support UEFI enough to usefully boot a battery of generic ARM Linux images". The Raspberry Pi can be made SystemReady, and Radxa also makes SystemReady-compliant SBCs you can buy. RISC-V would do well to adopt and promote a similar spec.
- mrheosuper 9mo agoI wonder why we are not storing base DTB on the board, just enough to boot the board.
- crimsoneer 9mo agoNot everything needs to be for everyone. I think this is super cool - I run a local transcription tool on my laptop, and the idea of miniaturising it is super cool.
- noodletheworld 9mo agoIt is neat, and at 32GB it might be useful. Almost nothing useful runs in 8. This is the problem with this gen of “external AI boards” floating around. 8, 16, even 24 is not really enough to run much useful, and even then (ie. offloading to disk) they're so impractically slow. Forget running a serious foundation model, or any kind of realtime thing. The blunt reality is fast high memory GPU systems you actually need to self host are really really expensive. These devices are more optics and dreams (“itd be great if…”) than practical hacker toys.
- ChromaticPanic 9mo agoVision models are way smaller and run decently on these things.
- buran77 9mo ago> Not everything needs to be for everyone I wouldn't dare suggest that. The RPi was never for everyone yet it turned out it was for many. It was small but powerful for the size, it was low power, it was extremely flexible, it had great software support, and last but not least, it was dirt cheap. There was nothing like that on the market. They need to target a "minimum viable audience" with a unique value proposition otherwise they'll just Rube-Goldberg themselves into irrelevance. This hat is a convoluted way to change the parameters of an existing compromise and turn it into a different but equally difficult compromise. Worse performance, better efficiency, adds cost, and it doesn't differentiate itself from the competing Hailo-10H-based products that work with any system not just RPi (e.g. ASUS UGen300 USB AI Accelerator). > the idea of miniaturising If you aren't ditching the laptop you aren't miniaturizing, just splitting into discrete specialized components.
- dev_l1x_be 9mo agoI love RPI4s for local homelab roles like DNS servers, even for NAS with USB attached external storage, VPN gateways (with Tailscale).
- baq 9mo agoIt's actually not great since Ethernet is over USB on the pi 4 (edit this is not true, confused with pi 3). Not that it doesn't work, but I'd rather have an N100 minipc. OTOH with ram prices being where they are and no signs of coming back down in the foreseeable future a second hand pi 4 may be a very wise choice.
- ajb 9mo agoI think you mean the pi3? On the pi4 the ethernet is connected to the main SoC.
- vardump 9mo ago> It's actually not great since Ethernet is over USB on the pi 4. Not true, you're thinking about earlier models.
- baq 9mo agoyeah... sorry about that (note I do have an N100 box as a home server, though)
- oliwarner 9mo agoNah, they released products better suited to what people were already using Pis for. The Picos are great for the smaller stuff, new Pis are great for bigger stuff, and old Pis and Zeros are still available. They've innovated around their segment. The AI stuff is just an expression of that. People are doing AI on Pi5s and this is just a way to make that better.
- avhception 9mo agoI don't know of any other ARM device that fulfills: - I can boot it w/o having to learn about custom U-Boot implementations - I, as a consumer or small business, can buy - Can not only buy today but also still buy in 2 years - Doesn't cost a small fortune - Can be tugged away behind TVs and other small niches
- muggesmuds 9mo agoOdroids!
- avhception 9mo agoDo they still need a custom kernel?
- dominicrose 9mo agoI understand wanting to run a local LLM for privacy, but on something more powerful. Yes it's costly but what use is an LLM on a cheap board?
- avhception 9mo agoI was mostly responding to > [...] if I want some low power linux PC replacement with display output, for the price of the latest RPi 5, I can buy on the used market a ~2018 laptop I guess. I don't care about the AI hat at all.
- horsawlarway 9mo agoDepends entirely on the model you want to run. There are some absolutely useful things you can do with TTS/STT/Diarization/etc on even really minimal specs. Some of those will run fine on RPis even without this new hat. The extra ram probably opens the door to a large number of vision/image models, which typically want a minimum of 16Gb, but do better with 24/32. There are just a HUGE number of case specific models that do just fine on hardware at the RPi level, assuming you have the ram to load them.
- wpm 9mo ago
- Croak 9mo agoPeople have for quite some time been using Googles Tensor chip to accelerate AI workloads on the Pi. I doubt that anyone runs Llms on Pis but stuff like security cameras with object detection...
- nirav72 9mo agoI read somewhere that Google has largely abandoned support for their Coral TPUs? I still use a Coral TPU for Frigate NVR. But not sure how long they'll be supported.
- Dr4kn 9mo agoThe Coral isn't recommended by it anymore for most use cases. They're going to support it, but it shows it's age by never being updated for years
- mindcrash 9mo ago> I think Raspberry lost the magic of the older Pis, they lost that sense of purpose. They basically created a niche with the first Pis, now they're just jumping into segments that others created and are already filled to the brim with perhaps even more qualified competition. I don't think you will find anything on the market enabling you to create your own audiophile quality AMP, DAC, or AMP+DAC for a pretty attractive price except a Pi 3/4/5 with a HifiBerry (https://www.hifiberry.com/ https://www.hifiberry.com/) HAT.
- yoavm 9mo agoThere are some nice ESP-based solutions - https://sonocotta.com/esp-products/ https://sonocotta.com/esp-products/
- NoboruWataya 9mo agoIMO this is a consequence of Raspberry Pi going for-profit and IPOing. Now they are incentivised to chase the same hype trains as every other public tech company. I can't see them having another "Raspberry Pi moment", those are too risky now. That said, more options at the (relatively speaking) low end of the AI hardware market probably isn't a bad thing. I'm not particularly an AI enthusiast generally, but if it is going to infest everything anyway, then at least I would like a decent ecosystem for running local models.
- windexh8er 9mo agoI think this is a miss on what the Pi is: an experiment. Sure, it stood on the shoulders of other SFF boards that came before it - but it broke into the general computing landscape targeting makers and builders. If the AI hat doesn't work out, so be it. The use cases for this type of hat may yet to be seen. On one hand it may feel shortsighted to bringing hardware to market with no explicit use case, but that's part of the Pi brand. As someone else mentioned: if the hat could efficiently be leveraged with the YOLO models on Frigate for a low volume camera setup that could be a nice niche use case for it. Either way I hope the RPi org keeps dropping things like this and letting the users sort out the use cases with their dollars.
- ChromaticPanic 9mo agoOn device processing for robots and drones
- Zetaphor 9mo agoEveryone here is missing the fact that this board was made by a third party, not the Raspberry Pi organization.
- rocketvole 9mo agoWhat? Sure, its technically using technology by hailo, but it's definitely from the RPI organization
- jasongill 9mo agoIt's not "made by a third party" - it's sold as a first-party add-on, by Raspberry Pi on their own website, in a Raspberry Pi branded package. https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/ai-hat-plus-2/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/ai-hat-plus-2/ It's no more "made by a third party" than any other electronics device made by a contract manufacturer.
- Zetaphor 9mo agoOh, I did not realize it was getting that first class treatment, I thought (from only reading the article) that this was just a hat made by a third party and sold for the ecosystem.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- lenerdenator 9mo agoGotta get that investor cash. In regard to their niche, their niche is a ridiculously well-documented ecosystem for SBCs. Want to do something with your RPi? You can find it on Google, and the LLM of your choice is probably trained to give you the answer on how to do it. If you're just tinkering or getting a POC ready, that's a big help. Of course, if you're in the business of hardware prototyping, and have a set of libraries and programs you know you're going to work with, you don't need to care as much.
- andix 9mo agoMy biggest issue is the lack of really good cases. There are all those fancy peripherals you can buy, but it's really hard to find simple case that works without overheating and no cables sticking out on all four sides.
- nkko 9mo agoThat magic now moved to ESP32.
- rpcope1 9mo agoThis is why I keep buying 3B+ and Zero 2 W and not any of the newer versions...it's much more in keeping with the relatively low cost board with GPIO and reasonable compute. It's kind of the last one they made that does what I kind of expected out of a Raspberry Pi at a reasonable price point. If I needed more compute I would have skipped the travesty that is ARM and just bought an x86 system.
- iamrobertismo 9mo agoI feel like if RPI doubled down heavily into education, they would be in a much better spot. They really could never win on price in the long run. But having a bit of K-12 and university budgets going to RPIs every year, especially during the "teach the kids programming" era, would I think make them a much healthier business. Chromebooks did what RPI should have done.
- alnwlsn 9mo agoI still remember the email I got telling me that they were going to upgrade the RAM of the 256Mb Model B I ordered and that I would receive a brand new model with 512Mb for no extra cost. Hard to believe that was nearly 14 years ago. Was very helpful in me learning Linux. The only alternative I had at the time was a few old Pentium 4 machines, which were very noisy and my parents didn't like me leaving turned on for a long time.
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo agoThe original Pis are still for sale, are cheap, and still do everything you need. This doesn't conflict with an expanded product line. The whole reason for Pi is still GPIO plus general purpose computing. AI is now a part of general purpose computing, so it only makes sense to adopt it too. The things you can do locally with AI now are amazing. For several years there's been multiple open source products that can do both audio and visual processing locally using AI models. Local-only Home Assistant is almost equivalent to Siri. The more things you throw at it, the more computing power it needs (especially for low latency), and that's where the dedicated GPUs/NPUs (previously ASICs) are needed. And consider the expanded use cases; drones and robots can now navigate the world autonomously using a $150 SoC and some software.
- atmosx 9mo agoDo sales backup these claims that come up very often or not? Does anyone has any data? Although the op is not wrong, maybe their decisions are data driven and pay off?
- turtlebits 9mo agoMay have lost the magic with regards to price, but they're commodity hardware now. My rpi3 (that's been running since 2019) died last year and I was able to buy another and just plug in the SD card.