Arm is taking a minority stake in Raspberry Pi. By strengthening the relationship, the chip developer also hopes to get closer to IoT developers.

Arm is buying a minority stake in Raspberry Pi. It’s not clear exactly how many shares the chip maker is buying and for how much. Arm and Raspberry Pi are no strangers: the two have been working together since the original Pi was developed in 2008. However, a lot has changed since then: While Raspberry Pi initially aimed primarily at students, the small computers are now also appealing to hobbyists and are even used to develop edge applications.

“Arm and Raspberry Pi share a vision of making computing accessible to everyone,” said Paul Williamson, SVP and GM of Arm’s IoT business. “With the rapid growth of edge and endpoint AI applications, platforms like Raspberry Pi are critical.”

Closer relationships with developers

The minority share brings Arm closer to the Pi audience. That’s a good thing given the controversy surrounding Arm, even after Nvidia’s previous takeover attempt. This has somewhat affected Arm’s position as the “Switzerland of chips”. Although the acquisition was canceled, the prospect still forced developers to look for alternatives. Nvidia also wants to buy a piece of Arm.

The open source architecture RISC-V didn’t do badly there. Officially, Arm is not very impressed with the competitive capabilities of RISC-V, but unofficially we see that this announcement comes on the eve of the RISC-V conference in the USA. Additionally, Arm recognizes that future adoption of RISC-V could pose a risk over the ARM architecture. You can consider Raspberry Pi as the first line of defense against such development. Not quite up to date with ARM, Arm, RISC-V, x86 and what exactly is the meaning and difference? In a previous article we listed the most important points.