Welcome back to the second part of our mini-series on Raspberry Pi’s new first-party storage offerings. Previously, we covered the SD card lineup in detail, which we found to offer excellent value and reliable performance on Raspberry Pi computers. If you haven’t read part one yet, we highly recommend you do so first as it provides some context which will be useful as you read on.
Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi has had a busy few months. The seemingly endless barrage of new mainline products and accessories is impressive – from AI HAT+’s and cameras to the release of the long-awaited Compute Module 5, Raspberry Pi 500 and a refreshed 16 GB variant of Raspberry Pi 5. It’s been a proper doozy, and our backed-up review pipeline still hasn’t fully recovered.
The Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ makes a ton of sense. In a way, it’s exactly the product we expected back when we first caught wind of something AI-related going on over at Pi Towers. The Hailo-8L is back once again, but it’s been evicted from its dedicated third-party module and now lives directly soldered onto a custom HAT+ board. And okay, there’s a surprise guest in this story too, but more on that in a second.
Raspberry Pi sure is doubling down on artificial intelligence with its recent accessory releases. The excellent Raspberry Pi AI Kit brought 13 TOPS of AI compute to the Raspberry Pi 5 by strapping a general-purpose Hailo-8L M.2 AI accelerator module onto it using the power of the PCIe-based M.2 HAT+.
Artificial intelligence is not just about flashy, cutting-edge generative models running on extremely powerful enterprise hardware, churning data and answering life’s big (and not-so-big) questions. Just as important is a concept called on-device AI. The name sums the idea up quite succinctly: it’s all about running AI models right on end-user or edge hardware instead of relying on cloud servers.
Well, here’s the definitive answer – no, overclocking your Raspberry Pi won’t void the warranty. In fact, it never did. Our source? Raspberry Pi themselves.
The Raspberry Pi 5 immediately outclasses its predecessors by offering a much higher 2.4 GHz base clock, which is immediately impressive. Of course, as we’ve seen in our Raspberry Pi 5 review, this comes at a cost, as the new Raspberry Pi very quickly gets quite warm during use and thus requires a robust thermal solution.
Despite this, there’s additional untapped performance in the Raspberry Pi 5. How far you can push your board is highly dependent on the silicon lottery, but looking at the early articles, the numbers we see most people cap out at are 2.8 GHz, 3.0 GHz and 3.1 GHz.
It’s finally happening. The successor to the popular, but aging Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is finally here – the aptly-named Raspberry Pi 5 will be available to purchase by the end of October. Spending an unusually long time at the helm – four years – and receiving a significant boost in 2020 with the release of the 8 GB model, the retiring legend truly had a good run.
The excitement around Raspberry Pi’s product releases is always massive – their products, shaped by years of community (and top-notch first-party) support are representative of the way a piece of development tech is meant to function.
As single board computers progress and become more and more powerful, so does their use as a desktop replacement become ever more viable. We’ve talked about this before – with several companies marketing their products as capable of such feats while accomplishing the task with varying levels of success.
SBCs are great. Reading through our extensive list of SBC reviews we’ve created over the past few years, one can notice our own love for these little systems enabling everyone to deploy IoT systems and create various server-based projects, among other things.
We’ve already the overheating tendencies of modern SBCs a few times in the articles we’ve written in the past. Seriously, these little powerhouses need some sort of cooling – be it passive or active – to retain their peak performance for a reasonably long time.
We all love our Rapsberry Pi 4s, but it’s not a secret that they tend to overheat. Painfully so. It’s been the main complaint of every owner of one of these SBCs – and in our initial review of it, we’ve discovered that these issues aren’t limited to cosmetics only – as they negatively impact performance due to thermal throttling.
A few decades ago, computers were big, clunky boxes that were full of discrete electronics, daughter boards and expansion slots. Miniaturisation brought us to a slimmer, sleeker form factor but only further increased production costs from an already high starting point.
Another year has rolled around and there are new exciting Raspberry Pi products coming out on the market. Most of them are about what you’d expect – refinements and new form factors of the already established Raspberry Pi series of SBCs.
Hubor is a series or Raspberry Pi accessories by Xinguard, a relative newcomer to the SBC world, debuting their first products in 2019. They launched this line of products as an Indiegogo campaign, raising enough money by early backers to develop the line of cases and other add-ons for the SBC.
The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B came out a few weeks ago, and it brings a major leap forward in general usability and performance compared to its predecessors. The previous major revision of the board, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ paved the way towards a viable desktop replacement, but just wasn’t quite there.
Raspberry Pi today launches its next-generation Raspberry Pi 4, a significantly faster and more capable version of the popular industrial…