Arm Holdings plc today announced that it has made a strategic investment, a minority stake in Raspberry Pi Ltd — the arm of Raspberry Pi responsible for the new Raspberry Pi 5 and past Raspberry Pi products.
Arm's minority stake extends the long-term partnership between Arm and Raspberry Pi, which has seen Arm CPUs feature in all of the Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Pico SoC. The partnership began way before the Raspberry Pi was available for sale, in 2008 — when the original board was still just a dream. Fast-forward to 2023 and we have a generation of learners who have taken their first steps with coding, science and electronics thanks to the Raspberry Pi.
“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.
“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. This strategic investment is further proof of our continued commitment to the developer community, and to our partnership with Raspberry Pi.”
“Arm technology has always been central to the platforms we create, and this investment is an important milestone in our longstanding partnership,” said Eben Upton, CEO, Raspberry Pi.
“Using Arm technology as the foundation of our current and future products offers us access to the compute performance, energy efficiency and extensive software ecosystem we need, as we continue to remove barriers to entry for everyone, from students and enthusiasts, to professional developers deploying commercial IoT systems at scale.”
The Raspberry Pi range of single board computers has grown in power since the initial 2012 board was released with a single-core Arm CPU running at 700 MHz. The recent Raspberry Pi 5 is based around an Arm Cortex-A76 64-bit CPU running at 2.4 GHz, performing approximately 2-3 times better than the Raspberry Pi 4.
Arm's minority stake in Raspberry Pi Ltd also shows a firm commitment to the continuation of Arm CPUs in future Raspberry Pis. With the rise of RISC-V CPUs in devices ranging from $9 to hundreds of dollars it is clear to see that we will not be seeing a RISC-V based Raspberry Pi for the foreseeable future.
