In the eight and a bit years since the first model launched, the Raspberry Pi has traditionally been sold as a modular computer. You buy the board separately, attach your own peripherals, insert an SD card and then get to work on your own computing project. The Foundation watched as third-parties — including Kano — built their own all-in-one PC solutions around the Raspberry Pi, leading it to create its own Desktop Kit, which bundled all of the necessary tech to deploy a fully-functional desktop or coding workstation. Now, it’s going one better with the launch of the Raspberry Pi 400 — a complete personal computer built inside a 78-key keyboard that starts at $70.
The Pi 400 has almost the exact dimensions of the official Raspberry Pi keyboard and hub, but with all of the extra ports and and connectors needed to turn it into a PC. The power is provided by the same — albeit slightly tuned — quad-core Broadcom BCM2711 processor found in the Raspberry Pi 4, along with 4GB of RAM, dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 5.1, Gigabit Ethernet and three USB ports (two USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0). There are also two micro HDMI ports, a GPIO header and a microSD card slot for OS and data storage.
The $70 Computer Unit is the no-frills option: you literally get the keyboard and will need add your own power and accessories. However, the $100 Pi 400 Computer Kit includes a localized power supply, mouse, a pre-formatted 16GB microSD card, a Beginner’s Guide and a 1M micro HDMI to HDMI-A cable. It’s very similar to the Desktop Kit but with even fewer parts.
Raspberry Pi Foundation
The inspiration behind the Pi 400 came from “challenges for less-technical users in configuring a device with lots of parts, often without hands-on support because COVID-related restrictions on home visits,” confirmed Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton.
“The all-in-one form factor is about simplifying the setup for people who just want to use their Raspberry Pi as a PC. Fewer components on the desk means less clutter, faster setup and teardown times, and fewer opportunities to misconfigure the device. It actually also brings some cost savings, so the kit is significantly cheaper than the Pi 4 4GB Desktop Kit ($100 vs $120 RRP).”
The Raspberry Pi Desktop Kits will remain on sale for people who want the flexibility of the original form factor, or want to buy models with differing memory capabilities. The company doesn’t currently have any plans to offer a 2GB version of the Pi 400, due to the proportional cost saving being quite small, but may decide to offer a beefier model for “large corporate or educational deployments where the accumulated cost saving is worthwhile” further down the road.
Raspberry Pi Foundation
For those of a certain age, the Pi 400 may look familiar; the '80s was full of all-in-one micro computers like the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro and Atari 800XL. "I was a BBC Micro and Amiga kid," said Upton, "without those platforms I, and lots of other people like me, would never have ended up in the engineering field." Continuing that push to help young people study computer science has always been a core part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's mission, and Upton says "this is just the next phase of that journey."
The Raspberry Pi 400 is available to buy from today in the US, UK and France. The official list of resellers can be found here.
Intel teased its dedicated laptop GPU earlier in October, and it’s now rolling out the technology in earnest. The chip designer has announced that the first laptops using its Iris Xe Max graphics chip are available in some form, including the previously revealed Acer Swift 3X, the ASUS VivoBook Flip TP470 and Dell’s Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1. You can buy the Dell hybrid at Best Buy now in the US, although you’ll have to wait for the Acer and ASUS machines to make their way stateside.
Iris Xe Max is, as you might guess, Intel’s answer to the low-end GPUs you sometimes find in thin-and-light portables. The company promises “great” 1080p gaming for popular titles like Hitman 2 and Metro Exodus (though it won’t compete against systems with beefier GPUs). It’s also smart enough to switch to integrated graphics when they might be more effective — Dota 2 runs slightly faster on the built-in Iris Xe than it does either the Xe Max or NVIDIA’s MX350, Intel claimed.
However, it might be more appealing beyond games. New Deep Link tech lets software split tasks between Intel’s integrated GPU on Tiger Lake-based PCs and the Iris Xe Max, sometimes delivering performance that would normally require a desktop video card. Intel is claiming twice the single-stream video encoding prowess of a GeForce RTX 2080 by early 2021, although we’ll have to see how well that translates in the real world. The Xe Max can devote all its power resources to the CPU for apps that depend more on conventional processing.
You’ll likely see more laptops, but Intel has also teased partnerships to roll out budget desktops using the Intel Xe Max’s underlying architecture (Xe-LP) in the first half of 2021. You should truly gaming-ready desktop GPUs from Intel next year, as well. In that light, Iris Xe Max is really laying groundwork for a more ambitious entry into the graphics space. Whether or not everyday users are receptive is another matter. The GPU market has been notoriously reluctant to accommodate more than two entrants, and Intel is still synonymous with slow graphics for many users.
Microsoft’s latest Flight Simulatorentry doesn’t do anything small. It’s a title that comes on 10 DVDs and allows you to explore the world in almost its entirety. It turns out that scale even extends to its accidental inclusions. Flight Simulator users recently found an unusual landmark: a 212-story monolith towering over an otherwise nondescript suburb in Melbourne, Australia.
Engadget / Ei Ito
After some sleuthing, the title’s community found what had caused the tower to appear in Flight Simulator. When developer Asobo Studio built its detailed recreation of the globe, they pulled data from OpenStreetMap, a free map of the world to which anyone can contribute. About a year ago, a user named “nathanwright120” added a tag that said this one building in Melbourne had 212 floors instead of two. Based on their other contributions, it appears the edit was a simple typo, not them trying to mislead anyone. The error was later corrected by another OpenStreetMap contributor, but not before it made its way into Flight Simulator.
Engadget / Ei Ito
We’ve reached out to Microsoft to find out if the company plans to remove the building from Flight Simulator, and we’ll update this article when we hear back. Based on the title’s dedication to realism, there’s a good chance it’s not long for this world. So if you own a copy of Flight Simulator, board your favorite plane and visit it before it’s gone for good.
Right here’s a brand new set of slides being handed round that supposedly showcase AMD’s upcoming Radeon 6900 XT. They’re entirely false. Right here’s how you can tell:
in the first slide, the branding has been up to date on the upper correct, but the branding on the genuine GPU hasn’t been. Also, that’s a Radeon 5700 cooler with a Vega water-cooler subsequent to it, and there’s a transparent flaw within the image the place the radiator attaches to the cardboard.
The specs themselves are pretty affordable. I’m now not pronouncing how accurate I think they're, however the specs are the only a part of the slide that isn’t immediately fake. On the very least, I’d need to get out a calculator and run some numbers first.
The fact that there’s a price on the cardboard is a further manner you understand this slide is false. Fee is normally the last factor a company decides on.
This slide made me laugh out loud after I noticed it. Whoever created this work of art has by no means, ever, talked to anyone in advertising.
Advertising, my friends, is all about optimism. You would word, for example, that after AMD declared Ryzen would have an IPC 1.4x bigger than Excavator, they didn't achieve this with a large slide labeled NO more BULLDOZENT
There’s no method in hell AMD would ever advertise RDNA2 in a fashion that implied RDNA or any prior GPU used to be “compromised.” AMD continues to be shipping Vega silicon in its APUs and as a part of its compute trade.
AMD is unlikely to call its ray tracing implementation “RXRT,” and the estimated efficiency influence of enabling the function is hilarious, to put it flippantly.
I was no longer in particular delighted with Turing when it came out and i count on each Ampere and RDNA2 to offer sophisticated efficiency in ray tracing workloads, but there’s no danger that AMD takes a 5-9 percent penalty for enabling ray-tracing results. If real-time ray tracing most effective carried a 5-10 percent performance penalty relative to rasterization, we’d have integrated RTRT a very long time ago.
The average performance hit for utilising ray tracing is more alongside the strains of fifty-80 percentage. When you consider that we best have one new release of hardware from one company, we don’t know the way a lot that number can also be extended — nevertheless it beggars perception to consider AMD has reduce it by practically an order of magnitude. It’s no longer even clear which RTX video games will aid RDNA2 ray tracing out of the gate.
The “best 4K Gaming experience” is spot-on for a advertising slide, however AMD doesn’t give you recreation element settings in the bars of its slides, and they don’t label up the y-axis to the factor that you must twist your neck like an owl with the intention to learn it.
Also, excellent to peer top-notch efficiency in red lifeless Redemption, a game that on no account obtained a computer unlock. By no means heard of “Witcher three,” either, when you consider that the precise identify of the series is “The Witcher.”
that is what it looks like when men and women with more aspiration than Photoshop attempt to troll AMD lovers. There’s a constant design language to AMD’s slide decks and a regular manner that businesses be in contact about their merchandise. These slides fail at both.
I declare this GPU a brand new and distinct product under the solar. Imparting the AMD Radeaint 6900 XT, launching September 2020.
Raspberry Pi Foundation
Raspberry Pi Foundation
