NeuroPi HAT Looks to Bring Neuromorphic Memory Technology to the Raspberry Pi
Nepes aims to bring brain-like neuromorphic memory to the Raspberry Pi with an upcoming dual-chip NM500 add-on board.
Korean artificial intelligence specialist Nepes Corporation has begun teasing a small add-on for the Raspberry Pi family of single-board computers which is designed to offer AI-friendly neuromorphic memory technology: the NeuroPi HAT.
Dating back to the 1980s, neuromorphic computing is designed to produce semiconductors which operate more like the human brain — and, in doing so, make computers which are considerably more efficient at artificial intelligence tasks than a traditional binary system. It's a concept which has small start-ups looking to compete with industry giants like Intel, with Nepes falling firmly into the former category.
Built around the company's NM500 neuromorphic chip — which has a somewhat limited 256 bytes of memory in the form of 576 "neurons", though multiple chips can be chained in finished product designs — the NeuroPi HAT builds on the company's larger NeuroShield add-on for FPGAs. The NeuroPi HAT adds two NM500 chips to an existing system - but rather than a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development board, the NeuroPi HAT hooks into a low-cost Raspberry Pi.
While the two NM500 neuromorphic memory chips add a mere 512 bytes to a platform which has at least 256MB of its own, the company claims it can achieve great things. A demonstration video, reproduced above, shows a Raspberry Pi using an earlier NeuroShield — which comes with just one NM500, though can accept 'Brick' modules to add more in pairs — using an accelerated computer vision system to optimise the harvesting of ripe coffee beans.
The actual real-world performance of a neuromorphic chip will depend heavily on the workload, with many tasks a standard computer can handle being ill-suited to neuromorphic processing. Nepes claims that a single 576-neuron NM500, however, can perform 100,000 pattern recognition calculations per second in a power envelope measured in milliwatts.
Images of the NeuroPi HAT board, which connects to the Raspberry Pi through the 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, have been shared by Arm's senior manager for the IoT ecosystem Rex St. John via Twitter; while Nepes confirms the product on its website, it states simply that it is "coming soon."
Pricing for the NeuroPi HAT has yet to be confirmed, but with the NeuroShield costing $99 a sub-$100 launch price seems all-but guaranteed. More information on NM500 itself is available on the Nepes website.