If you're tired of waiting for Apple to migrate its Mac Pro workstation-class desktop to Apple Silicon, the Ampere Altra Developer Platform might be the next best thing:
I somehow convinced Ampere/ADLINK to send me a workstation after my now years-long frustrated attempts at getting graphics cards working on the Raspberry Pi. And they sent me a beast of a machine:
It's risky business fighting Intel, AMD, and Arm, and that's exactly what Star Five is trying to do with this:
The chip on this new single board computer could be the start of a computing revolution—at least that's what some people think!
The VisionFive 2 has a JH7110 SoC on it, sporting a new Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) called RISC-V.
Radxa's Rock 5 model B is an ARM single board computer that's 3x faster than a Raspberry Pi. And that's just the 8-core CPU—with PCI Express Gen 3 x4 (the Pi has Gen 2 x1), storage is 7x faster! I got over 3 GB/sec with a KIOXIA XG6 NVMe SSD.
It's still half as slow as modern ARM desktops like Apple's M1 mini, or Microsoft's Dev Kit 2023 (see my review here). But it's way faster than a Pi, it comes with 2.5 Gig Ethernet, it has two M.2 slots on board... and, well—it also starts at $150!
Raspberry Pi just announced their new Camera Module 3, which comes in four variations (standard and wide angle, normal and NoIR for infrared use), and costs $25 for the standard versions, and $35 for wide angle.
That's a step up from the older Camera Module 2, which cost $25 and only came in a 'standard' focal length.
I posted a video reviewing the Camera Module 3 on YouTube, and you can watch it here:
Last week Microsoft started selling their $599 Windows Dev Kit 2023, formerly known as 'Project Volterra'.
I got my hands on one after a little bit of a shipping delay, and promptly started tearing it down to see what's inside. You can click here to browse the entire Twitter thread where I posted pictures of the box contents and teardown, or view it below:
AnsibleFest is fast approaching, and this year it'll finally be back in person, in Chicago. Since that's a short jaunt from St. Louis, I'll be headed up to talk about my Homelab this year!
More specifically, I'll be giving a talk titled Ansible for the Homelab, and I'll walk through how I have at least part of my sprawling homelab environment automated using Ansible.
Linus Media Group, the media production agency behind giant YouTube tech channels like Linus Tech Tips and Techquickie, just launched the LTT Screwdriver, a $69.99 ratcheting screwdriver geared for building PCs and general use.
And Linus Sebastian, the man behind it all, didn't hold any punches. In the Screwdriver launch video, he said:
A few months ago someone told me about a new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 cluster board, the DeskPi Super6c.
You may have heard of another Pi CM4 cluster board, the Turing Pi 2, but that board is not yet shipping. It had a very successful Kickstarter campaign, but production has been delayed due to parts shortages.
No stranger to rack-mounting Macs that were never meant for the task, I reached out to MyElectronics to see if they had a rackmount solution for the Mac Studio when I bought mine in March.
They said they were already working on a Mac Studio Rack Mount system, and they'd gladly send me one to review, since they knew how much I loved rackmounting my M1 Mac mini and all the Raspberry Pis I run in my homelab.
Last month, I built an all-AMD PC to try out Linux Gaming with Steam and Proton, and so I'd have a faster native Linux build machine for my various compilation tasks.
This month, Apple introduced the Mac Studio, and as a now full-time video producer, it was a no-brainer for me to upgrade from an M1 Mac mini.
My Mac Studio arrived Friday, and over the weekend, I spent some time benchmarking it against not only my M1 mini, but also my new AMD Ryzen 5 5600x PC build.
My Mac Studio's specs: