raspberry pi

AMD Radeon PRO W7700 running on Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 5 with AMD Radeon PRO W7700 graphics card

After years of work among a bunch of people in the Pi community (special callout to Coreforge!), we finally have multiple generations of AMD graphics cards working on the Raspberry Pi 5.

We recently got Polaris-era GPUs working (like the RX460), but in the past month we've gotten 6000 and 7000-series GPUs up and running. And many parts of the driver work at full performance—well, as much as can be had on the Raspberry Pi's single PCIe Gen 3 lane (8 GT/sec)!

I've been testing tons of modern AAA games, like Doom Eternal and Crysis Remastered, and can get 10-15 fps at 4K with Ray Tracing on, or 15-20 fps at 4K. Dropping down to 1080p is not enough to overcome the Pi's CPU bottleneck—only at resolutions under 720p does the Pi's CPU and the single PCIe lane not seem to get in the way quite as much.

Home Assistant and CarPlay with the Pi Touch Display 2

After a decade, Raspberry Pi finally upgraded their official Touch Display from 480p to 720p, while keeping the price and overall aesthetic the same.

Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 - Home Assistant Dashboard

I've had early access to the Touch Display 2, and have been testing it in a variety of scenarios. Generally, Linux touchscreen support isn't wonderful. And Pi OS, being a fairly customized UI focused on simple use cases, is not quite to a usable state if you go touchscreen-only, considering I had trouble getting the onscreen keyboard to work in Chromium half the time, and it would overlay things I was typing even in fully-supported apps like Terminal.

3rd Party PoE HATs for Pi 5 add NVMe, fit inside case

Today I published a video detailing my testing of three new Raspberry Pi HATs—these HATs all add on PoE+ power and an NVMe SSD slot, though the three go about it in different ways.

You can watch the video for the full story (embedded below), but in this post I'll go through my brief thoughts on all three, and link to a few other options coming on the market as well.

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GeeekPi P33 M.2 NVMe M-Key PoE+ HAT

52Pi P33 GeeekPi PoE+ NVMe HAT for Pi 5

Use an External GPU on Raspberry Pi 5 for 4K Gaming

After I saw Pineboards 4K Pi 5 external GPU gaming demo at Maker Faire Hanover, I decided it was time to set up my GPU test rig and see how the Pi OS amdgpu Linux kernel patch is going.

GLmark2 running on Pi 5 with AMD RX 460 external GPU

I tested it out on a livestream over the weekend, but I thought I'd document the current state of the patch, how to apply it, and what else is left to do to get full external GPU support on the Raspberry Pi.

I also have a full video up with more demonstrations of the GPU in use, you can watch it below:

New 2GB Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings

Raspberry Pi launched the 2 gig Pi 5 for $50, and besides half the RAM and a lower price, it has a new stepping of the main BCM2712 chip.

BCM2712 C1 vs D0 Stepping chips

This is the BCM2712 D0 stepping. Older Pi 5's shipped with a C1. In their blog post, they said:

The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the bits we need.

Steppings are basically chip revisions where they don't change functionality, and usually just fix bugs, or tweak the layout. But even tiny design changes could have unintended consequences. I wanted to see exactly what happens when I push one of these new chips to the limits.

First, I wanted a performance baseline, so I ran Geekbench with the latest Pi OS and all the defaults.

Positron - an upside-down and portable 3D printer

I've been getting into 3D printing lately. I have an older Ender 3 V2 at home I bought during COVID. And in the past year I've acquired an Ender 3 S1, Bambu Labs P1S, and Prusa MK4.

I also dove head-first into 3D CAD, and designed a number of small SBC cases or parts to help with things around the house.

But I'd never built my own 3D printer from a kit—all the printers I've had were pre-built and at most, required assembling the prebuilt gantry or toolhead. That finally changed with the Positron V3.2:

Radxa X4 SBC Unites Intel N100 and Raspberry Pi RP2040

At first glance, especially from the top, the Radxa X4 is your typical Arm SBC:

Radxa X4 Top

But you'll quickly notice the lack of an SoC—that's on the bottom. Looking more closely, what's a Raspberry Pi chip doing on top?! First, let's flip over the board to investigate. There's the SoC: definitely not Arm inside, this thing's an Intel N100:

Radxa X4 Bottom - Intel N100 SoC

I have all my benchmarks and notes bringing up this board stored in my sbc-reviews GitHub repository: Radxa X4 - geerlingguy's sbc-reviews, and I also summarized everything in a video on YouTube, which you can watch inline (or skip past and read this blog post instead):

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 - RP2350 adds more PIO, RISC-V cores

Pico 2 Logo

The $5 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was announced today, with a new chip, the RP2350. This silicon improves on almost every aspect of the RP2040:

  • 3 PIOs instead of 2
  • 150 MHz instead of 133 MHz base clock
  • Faster Arm Cortex M33 cores and RISC-V Hazard3 cores

I've had access to pre-release hardware and good news: even though the new chip is faster and has more features, it actually uses less power than RP2040, meaning if you run one of these things off a battery, it'll last longer.

I'll talk more about power later, but first, here's the specs.

Pico 2 and Pico side by side comparison

Hacking Pi firmware to get the fastest overclock

Raspberry Pi 5 with dry ice smoke surrounding it

Since boosting my Pi 5 from the default 2.4 GHz clock to 3.14 GHz on Pi Day, I've wanted to go faster. Especially since many other users have topped my Geekbench scores since then :)

In March, Raspberry Pi introduced new firmware that unlocked frequencies above 3,000 MHz for overclocking. This summer, NUMA Emulation patches boosted performance another 5-10% through memory access optimizations.

But even with a golden sample Pi 5, I haven't seen anybody go much beyond 3.1 or 3.2 GHz. The problem seemed to be power supply—the Pi's firmware limits the SoC to a maximum of 1.000V.