Raspberry's Pi 500 is the perfect throwback to the 1980s golden age of home computing and I'd love to relive those moments again with a modern machine
Raspberry Pi devices are the ultimate hobby for the computing enthusiast, being tiny in size, low in price, but packed with performance and features. They're not the most convenient of things to use, though, so four years ago, Raspberry released the Pi 400—a Raspberry Pi embedded into a keyboard. Now it's back with a new version, the Pi 500, with double the processing power of its predecessor.
The first computers in my life were British-made Sinclair machines, comprising all the computing hardware stuffed inside a keyboard. They were very cheap, especially compared to more serious computers of that time, but they were also very easy to use. The likes of the ZX Spectrum introduced me to video gaming, programming, and messing about with electronics.
So when I saw news of the release of the Raspberry Pi 500 (via Sweclockers) and saw the specs and pictures on the main site for it, I got a burst of nostalgia. And then a flood of regret, once I remembered about all my other Raspberry Pi units just collecting dust, somewhere in a forgotten corner.
Anyway, so what exactly is the Pi 500? At face value it's a rather fetching white keyboard, with a raft of ports about its rear, but delve inside and you'll find the latest version of the Raspberry Pi. We're up to number 5 now and it's a substantial improvement over the fourth iteration, though with some caveats to that statement.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is a twin-chip affair, with the CPU and GPU in the primary die made by Broadcom and the secondary one handling input and output duties, much like the chipset on a PC motherboard. Specs-wise, it boasts a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, a 12-core VideoCore VII GPU, and 8 GB of LPDDR4X-4267 RAM.
That's paired with the RP1 I/O controller, offering Bluetooth 5.0, 1Gb Ethernet, two USB 3.0 Type-A and one USB 2.0 Type-A ports, a 40-pin GPIO (general purpose IO) header, and two micro-HDMI sockets (good for 4K, 60 Hz).
It's priced at <a data-analytics-id=«inline-link»
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