New expansion board for Raspberry Pi 5 offers NPU performance on par with Intel and AMD APUs

Single-board computers can massively benefit from an NPU, as these make it possible to analyze data via neural networks. Possible use cases include the recognition of patterns in data or even images. The Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 is a new expansion board that’s supposed to boost the AI computing performance of the Raspberry Pi 5 by up to 40 TOPS (INT4). It utilizes a well-known NPU, specifically the Hailo-10H, which has its own onboard memory with a capacity of 8GB. As a result, running AI models ideally has little to no impact on the performance of the SBC itself.

Installing the expansion board is straightforward and follows the well-known HAT concept. The board is mounted to the Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB model from $105 on Amazon) with screws and then hooked up via the GPIO header and a PCIe connection. Older Raspberry Pi models do not have a PCIe interface, which means that compatibility is limited to newer single-board computers.

The Raspberry Pi 5 expansion board should be easy to use, which can be expected from an official add-on. More specifically, the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 is natively recognized by the Raspberry Pi OS and can then be used to run AI applications. This new board is already available at some specialized retailers and costs around $130.