Raspberry Pi AI gateway specialist Sixfab has kicked off 2026 by winning CES 2026’s Best of Innovation award for its ALPON X5 AI edge computer, as described in the show-floor write-up. It’s a neat reminder that “edge AI” is no longer synonymous with “Jetson or bust”: we’re now seeing serious, deployment-minded systems built on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5-class hardware.

Raspberry Pi AI Gateway: What Won at CES

The ALPON X5 AI is positioned as an on-device AI computer for video and sensor analytics, with an emphasis on keeping raw data local and pushing only events (or anonymized outputs) upstream. The CES Innovation Awards listing calls out fleet-scale features like zero-touch onboarding, OTA updates, health monitoring, and policy controls, along with security building blocks such as verified boot, signed software, and hardware cryptography.
 

A CES Innovation Awards 2026 Winner Honoree banner showing three featured products: a DEEPX AI vision processor, a DX-H1 v-NPU card, and the Sixfab ALPON X5 gateway.


If you’ve ever tried to duct-tape “prototype security” onto a field deployment after the fact, you already know why that list matters. You can see the official entry in the Innovation Awards entry.

Hardware Notes: CM5 Plus DX-M1

Sixfab’s recipe is Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 plus DEEPX’s DX-M1 neural accelerator. DEEPX rates the DX-M1 at 25 TOPS (INT8) and lists a PCIe Gen3 x4 interface, with power in the 2 W to 5 W range depending on model/workload support. Those are the kind of numbers that make sense for fanless boxes and distributed installs where thermal headroom is limited but “real” inference still needs to happen on-site. The relevant figures are laid out in the DX-M1 specifications.

Why This Matters for Real Deployments

For engineers, the interesting part isn’t the trophy; it’s the packaging of compute, acceleration, connectivity, and lifecycle management into something you can plausibly roll out across multiple sites without building an entire platform team first. A Raspberry Pi AI gateway like this can be the difference between a pilot that stays a pilot and a system that can be installed, monitored, updated, and secured like real infrastructure. If you want a quick refresher on the platform family this builds on, Elektor’s Raspberry Pi 5 overview is a useful starting point.