coral

Coral.ai TPUs are AI accelerators used for tasks like machine vision and audio processing. Raspberry Pis are often integrated into small robotics and IoT products—or used to analyze live video feeds with Frigate.

Until today, nobody I know of has been able to get a PCI Express Coral TPU working on the Raspberry Pi. The Compute Module 4, unfortunately, had some quirks in its PCIe implementation, preventing the use of the Coral over PCIe.

The Raspberry Pi 5 has a much improved PCIe bus—capable of reaching Gen 3 speeds even!—and I've already tested the first PCIe NVMe HATs for Pi 5.

So can the Pi 5 handle the Coral TPU natively over PCIe?

Yes. Though currently, you need to tweak a few things to get it working.

The Raspberry Pi 5 includes 5 active PCI Express lanes—4 go to the new RP1 chip for I/O like USB, Ethernet, MIPI Camera and Display, and GPIO, and 1 goes to a new external PCIe connector:

By default, all PCIe lanes operate at Gen 2.0 speeds, or about 5 GT/sec per lane. Currently there's no way to change that default for the RP1 chip's 'internal' lanes, but on the external connector, you can add the following lines inside /boot/firmware/config.txt (and reboot) to upgrade the connection to Gen 3.0 (8 GT/sec, almost double the speed):

I recently tried setting up an M.2 Coral TPU on a machine running Debian 12 'Bookworm', which ships with Python 3.11, making the installation of the pyCoral library very difficult (maybe impossible for now?).

Some of the devs responded 'just install an older Ubuntu or Debian release' in the GitHub issues, as that would give me a compatible Python version (3.9 or earlier)... but in this case I didn't want to do that.