Wednesday, June 4th 2025

EdgeCortix SAKURA-II Enables GenAI on Raspberry Pi 5 and Arm Systems

EdgeCortix Inc., a leading fabless semiconductor company specializing in energy-efficient Artificial Intelligence (AI) processing at the edge, today announced that its industry leading AI accelerator, SAKURA-II M.2 Module is now available with Arm-based platforms, including Raspberry Pi 5 and AETINA's Rockchip (RK3588) platform, delivering unprecedented performance and efficiency for edge AI computing applications.

This powerful integration marks a major leap in democratizing real-time Generative AI capabilities at the edge. Designed with a focus on low power consumption and high AI throughput, the EdgeCortix SAKURA-II M.2 module enables developers to run advanced deep learning models directly on compact, affordable platforms like the Raspberry Pi 5—without relying on cloud infrastructure.
"Bringing our low-power AI acceleration technology to Raspberry Pi 5 users opens the door for innovators and enterprises around the world to build smarter, faster, and more efficient edge AI-driven devices and systems rapidly," said Dr. Sakyasingha Dasgupta, Founder and CEO of EdgeCortix. "We're excited to bring real-world Generative AI capabilities to embedded Arm platforms and fuel the next wave of intelligent, autonomous systems as we pioneer the future of the connected intelligent edge."

"Pairing the Raspberry Pi 5 with EdgeCortix's SAKURA-II delivers an incredibly efficient and scalable platform for real-time generative AI at the edge", said Sailesh Chittipeddi, Venture Partner at Novo Tellus Capital Partners and Board Member at both Lantronix and Tessolve. "What's equally compelling is SAKURA-II's ability to accelerate a broad range of Arm-based systems, empowering next-gen IOT and edge applications engineers to deploy high-performance AI solutions across diverse applications without the cost or power burden of traditional data center hardware."

Key Benefits of SAKURA-II with Raspberry Pi5 and other Arm-enabled Platforms:
  • Ability to run the latest Gen AI on-device: Run advanced AI models including Vision Transformers, Small Language Models, and Vision Language Models (VLMs) directly on-device, with minimal latency and power draw.
  • Optimized for Arm: Seamless offloading of AI workloads from Arm processors allows for balanced performance and efficiency.
  • Fast time-to-market: Developers can quickly scale from prototypes to production using production-ready SAKURA-II M.2 modules with certified Raspberry Pi 5 and other Arm platforms.
  • Affordable AI Deployment: SAKURA-II and Raspberry Pi deliver powerful edge AI at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions—reducing infrastructure needs and enabling cost-efficient scaling.
  • Offline, Autonomous AI for SWaP-C-Constrained Environments: Perfect for drones, robotics, smart agriculture, and security—where size, weight, power, and cost limitations demand efficient on-device intelligence.
With these Arm platforms, EdgeCortix is empowering a broad ecosystem of developers and hardware innovators to build cost-effective, production-ready edge AI solutions. Pairing the SAKURA-II M.2 Module's high-performance acceleration with the accessibility of Raspberry Pi 5 and other Arm-based devices, advanced Generative AI workloads—including ViTs, LLMs, VLMs—can now run efficiently at the edge. This enables both startups and enterprises to deploy intelligent applications without depending on the cloud.
Source: EdgeCortix
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4 Comments on EdgeCortix SAKURA-II Enables GenAI on Raspberry Pi 5 and Arm Systems

#1
soulphie
Im not one to really care about ai at all but i find it weird that i cant find any claim of tops with control+F and no watts
Posted on Reply
#2
TF-GrayWizard

$350 :eek:

will have to see how well it would do its job first before passing judgment but the price alone is kinda crazy if you consider you can get a 26 TOP Official AI HAT+ for the Raspberry Pi 5 for like $130-ish Dollars and a 16GB Pi5 for $120 I know what id choose out of the two. ;)
Posted on Reply
#3
L'Eliminateur
TF-GrayWizard
$350 :eek:
will have to see how well it would do its job first before passing judgment but the price alone is kinda crazy if you consider you can get a 26 TOP Official AI HAT+ for the Raspberry Pi 5 for like $130-ish Dollars and a 16GB Pi5 for $120 I know what id choose out of the two. ;)
This accelerator seems to be on another completely different ballpark than the Hailo8, look at the die size alone, plus it has 2x8gb for a LOT of local ram model and BW.
Posted on Reply
#4
TF-GrayWizard
L'EliminateurThis accelerator seems to be on another completely different ballpark than the Hailo8, look at the die size alone, plus it has 2x8gb for a LOT of local ram model and BW.
Definitely true for advanced use cases its probably cheaper to get a handful of these and RPi5's than spending the money on a fully kitted out server depending on exact use case to do AI tasks but for say weekend or hobbyist projects that are more for typical use case with AI with stuff such as the Raspberry Pi there are cheaper options available that will suffice.

At the end of the day all this AI hardware is meaningless but interesting to me as I don't have a need for it and tbh I bet most people will be in the same boat and the fact remains with all this AI bubble stuff is that how would such a device pay for itself long run in a more corporate setting because that will likely take a more important aspect of the cost as far as I can see it there isn't really many ways of monetizing means to pay it back outside of maybe service subscriptions and as more and more companies shove NPUs into product stacks the less likely such a policy would work in my opinion.

Even then I feel its a sooner rather than later the whole thing bursts and like VR and 4K/Full-HD other such buzzword gimmicks fades into the background and a new buzzword takes its place.
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Jun 9th, 2025 01:29 EDT change timezone

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