youtube

Raspberry Pi this morning launched the Pi 500 and a new 15.6" Pi Monitor, for $90 and $100, respectively.

They're also selling a Pi 500 Kit, complete with a Power Supply, Mouse, and micro HDMI to HDMI cable, for $120. This is the first time Raspberry Pi is selling a complete package, where every part of a desktop computer could be Pi-branded—and makes me wonder if uniting all these parts into one could result in an eventual Pi Laptop...

Before we get too deep, no, the Pi 500 does not include a built-in M.2 slot. Sort-of.

Cores are the new megahertz, at least for enterprise servers. We've gone quickly from 32, to 64, to 80, to 128, and now to 192-cores on a single CPU socket!

Amazon built Graviton 4, Google built Axiom, but if you want your own massive Arm server, Ampere's the only game in town. And fastest Arm CPU in the world is inside the box pictured above.

It has 192 custom Arm cores running at 3.2 Gigahertz, and in some benchmarks, it stays in the ring with AMD's fastest EPYC chip, the 9965 "Turin Dense", which also has 192 cores.

High-core-count servers are the cutting edge in datacenters, and they're so insane, most software doesn't even know how to handle it. btop has to go full screen on the CPU graph just to fit all the cores:

The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 is smaller than a credit card, and I already have it gaming in 4K with an eGPU, running a Kubernetes cluster, and I even upgraded my NEC Commercial display from a CM4 to CM5, just swapping the Compute Modules!

The Compute Module 4 was hard to get for years. It launched right after the COVID supply chain crisis, leading to insane scalper pricing.

It was so useful, though, that Raspberry Pi sold every unit they made, and they're inside everything: from commercial 3D printers, to TVs, to IP KVM cards.

After a long journey getting AMD graphics cards working on the Raspberry Pi 5, we finally have a stable patch for the amdgpu Linux kernel driver, and it works on AMD RX 400, 500, 6000, and (current-generation) 7000-series GPUs.

With that, we also have stable Vulkan graphics and compute API support.

When I wrote about getting a Radeon Pro W7700 running on the Pi, I also mentioned AMD is not planning on supporting Arm with their ROCm GPU acceleration framework. At least not anytime soon.

Luckily, the Vulkan SDK can be used in its place, and in some cases even outperforms ROCm—especially on consumer cards where ROCm isn't even supported on x86!

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.

Recently Joshua Riek posted he's dropping off from GitHub. If you haven't heard of him, he's one of the few reasons working with Linux on Rockchip SBCs is so much easier today than it was just a few years ago.

His Ubuntu Rockchip distribution is built for Ubuntu 22 and 24, and they've been maybe the most popular and stable way to run Ubuntu on Rockchip devices.

So popular, in fact, that manufacturers who use Rockchip, like Turing Pi, build their own official images on top of Joshua's.

Now, if you're reminded of XKCD #2347, yeah, I am too.

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

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.

Two years ago, Linus Sebastian released a general purpose ratcheting screwdriver tailored towards PC building and IT needs. I reviewed the LTT Screwdriver, and found it to be a good tool that did improve a couple things where it counted: the ratchet mechanism was useful for a broad range of lighter tasks, and the in-handle bit storage was a creative improvement over the patented MegaPro Automotive design the LTT Screwdriver was based on.

The price of the LTT Screwdriver was about $15-20 more than I think it's worth, but it's still a good enough driver you can justify paying extra. I bought three LTT Screwdrivers and have one on each of my workbenches at home and at the studio!

Despite what it looks like, this isn't a hot-rod Apple Watch. This is an IP KVM. What does that mean? It's basically a remote control rocket pack for any computer, from a giant tower PC, to a little mini PC you might run in your homelab.

It's called JetKVM, and the team behind it sent me two to test out.

BIG SCARY DISCLAIMER: The JetKVM is currently on Kickstarter. If you decide to back it, and they don't deliver, that's... actually pretty common. I did back their Kickstarter, and I think they'll deliver, but there are no guarantees.

BuildJet did not pay for this post, and I am not sharing in any profit, or even using an affiliate link. I just saw this tiny KVM come across my feed, thought it looked amazing, and asked if I could test it out.

Update - October 17: Today Qualcomm cancelled all remaining orders, and will no longer support the Dev Kit.

I have mixed feelings publishing this post: many developers who are actively trying to port their Windows software to Arm are still awaiting shipment of their own Snapdragon Dev Kits, and I seem to be one of the first few people to receive one.

Everyone I've been in contact with also ordered the Dev Kit on July 16, but we've all been waiting for it to ship—for months.