Arm Holdings has acquired a minority stake in Raspberry Pi Ltd, reinforcing a partnership that began in 2008. This strategic investment is designed to support development of Raspberry Pi’s low-cost low-power Arm-based platforms aimed at edge computing and IoT applications, leveraging Raspberry Pi’s ability to deliver affordable, high-performance computing globally.;
“Arm and Raspberry Pi share a vision to make computing accessible for all, by lowering barriers to innovation so that anyone, anywhere can learn, experience and create new IoT solutions,” said Paul Williamson, SVP and GM, Internet of Things Line of Business, Arm.
Raspberry Pi’s single-board-computers (SBCs) for students, enthusiasts, and commercial edge and IoT developers have historically been based exclusively on system-on-chips featuring Arm cores. This is a big deal for Arm as Raspberry Pi has sold more than 40 million SBC units as of 2022, a huge number for Arm, which has not seen much success with IoT, despite high expectations of Softbank.
The use of Arm technology has been quite beneficial for Raspberry Pi’s product development, providing the necessary performance, energy efficiency, and software ecosystem to facilitate accessible computing for a wide range of users, from students to professional developers. But in the recent years competing SBCs based on RISC-V SoCs began to emerge, posing threat to Raspberry Pi’s domination and to Arm’s place in emerging edge computing, edge AI, and IoT markets.
In a bid to strengthen Raspberry Pi’s positions, Arm is infusing the company with cash, possibly trying to speed up development of more versatile and competitive solutions (either in terms of performance, or in terms of power).
“With the rapid growth of edge and endpoint AI applications, platforms like those from Raspberry Pi, built on Arm, are critical to driving the adoption of high-performance IoT devices globally by enabling developers to innovate faster and more easily,” said Williamson. “This strategic investment is further proof of our continued commitment to the developer community, and to our partnership with Raspberry Pi.”