I've been around long enough to find it absolutely astonishing, that you can now fit a computer with 16gb of ram, 265gb of storage and a quad core processor, with no cooling, inside a keyboard.
I've been around long enough to find it absolutely astonishing, that you can now fit a computer with 16gb of ram, 265gb of storage and a quad core processor, with no cooling, inside a keyboard.
It is astonishing! It's especially impressive when you realize that the motherboard itself is so small that most of the keyboard interior is basically empty space [0].
[0]: https://assets.raspberrypi.com/static/25912715ba437c32c56757...
I'll be hanging around until someone mods more PIs into it.
Thinking of the old Slashdot joke but with a twist. Imagine a Beowulf Cluster inside your keyboard.
This might be (relatively) easily achieved by networking a couple of Raspberry Pi Zero 2's together under the Pi 500+ keyboard shell.
That's incredible!
For a comparison, the "similar" computer from 2006 [0] had a maximum configuration of 4xCPU @ 1 GHz and 8GB of RAM. It weighed 60 lb (27 kg) and looked like this:
https://imgur.com/fc7BWTc
But Raspberry Pi 500+ has already 2.4GHz quad-core ARM64 CPU and 16GB RAM.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Tezro
Those capabilities have been in a much smaller slab you have been able to carry around in your pocket for the last 5 years minimum, and that slab was a fully functional computer with full touchscreen display input, microphone/speaker, and cellular.
The Samsung S20 Ultra (2020) has 16gb RAM 256GB of good fast storage, and with Dex you can connect it to a monitor and keyboard+mouse via a USB C dock and get a desktop window environment.
Of course the RPi costs less, but marvel over that, not the form or compactness. RPi innovated on cost, but this capacity in this form is everywhere. They don't even use most of the space inside the keyboard, the compute module is all the size of a smartphone.
Yeah it's the cost as well that's impressive. I've got a Samsung S25 Ultra in my pocket right now, but it cost like... £1200, so I'm less blown away by that somehow
They can already fit a way faster machine, inside something that can fit in your pocket. It also comes with a very high resolution screen.
The iPhone Air has an A19 (50% faster than M1 in single core and 10% faster in multi-core benchmarks), 12GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage in a space no larger than the raised bar the camera sits in.
Better yet. It would have made the TOP500 in 1997.