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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

Nit: It's the Pi 500+ (the + was eaten up by HN's automated title sensationalism-removal, I guess)

And I've posted benchmark data to my sbc-reviews repo here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/81

Performance-wise it's pretty much the same as the Pi 5 16GB (and can be slightly faster than the regular Pi 500 depending on the task, if it benefits from faster storage or more RAM...)

Since this is the first Pi with built-in NVMe (I'm not counting the Compute Module Developer Kit), I plugged in an eGPU and tested a new 15-line patch for AMD GPU drivers, which seems to support practically all modern AMD graphics cards[1].

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/full-egpu-acceleratio...

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> Nit: It's the Pi 500+

I really want to hope the name is a nod to the Amiga 500+ (which had twice the RAM of the A500 ..)

This made me do some research and I'd say it appears so.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-500-and-raspbe...

> Our experiences with that programme informed the development of Raspberry Pi 400, our all-in-one PC, whose form factor (and name) harks back to the great 8-bit and 16-bit computers – the BBC Micro, Sinclair Spectrum, and Commodore Amiga – of the 1980s and 1990s.

(emphasis mine)

So the 400 name is explicitly inspired by such systems, their next one is called the 500, and the upgrade to that is called the 500+. I'd say it's a pretty safe bet that's exactly the inspiration.

quite possible because it's from Europe, but remember that Apple was sticking + on the end of their model names 6 years before the Amiga existed.

I think that many companies have been appending + to the end of product names for an extremely long time. This is hardly an Apple innovation.

Next you're gonna try and tell me that Apple didn't invent the mobile phone. Or the portable MP3 player. Or the windowing GUI.

Jobs was "inspired" by a visit at Xerox labs, they showed him a GUI built using Smalltalk (which they'd also invented). So naturally, he ran back to his office and invented GUI ;)

There is no prize for second… unless you do it better.

Or for third I guess lol Jobs demoed a mac gui to Gates, and apparently Gates ran strait to his Microsoft office, where he too invented gui. Jobs was very upset for years.

Steve Jobs invented the "+" sign at Reed College!

Yes but it was much more stylish: ⌘

No, it was not Steve that found the Symbol but Susan Kare the Macintosh graphics artist. https://www.folklore.org/Swedish_Campground.html

Yeah, that means it was Steve. :P

(joking, relax..)

But unlike Steve, Susan will live on immortal - as the inventor of the Dogcow.

No, but they did invent rounded corners :^)

I think it actually was an Apple innovation, at least for {hobbyist, home, personal} computers. I did some digging and wasn't able to find anything before the Apple II+ in 1979. Please do prove me wrong, though!

I found an old edition of Byte from 77 where they advertise a "Vector Graphic Vector 1+":

https://isaac.lsu.edu/byte/issues/197710_Byte_Magazine_Vol_0...

A quick search doesn't find me pictures, but I did find a "Vector 1++”:

https://vintagecomputer.ca/vector-graphic-vector-1/

> remember that Apple was sticking + on the end of their model names 6 years before the Amiga existed.

Did they? AFAIK, Apple always used “Plus”, not “+” (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_Plus, https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/documenta...), and “+” is shorthand invented by the community.

The Macintosh Plus, similarly, wasn’t a Macintosh+ in Apple’s marketing, AFAIK.

And, looking at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_500#Amiga_500_Plus, it doesn’t look like Commodore stuck + on the end of their model names, either.

The BBC Model B (the machine the Raspberry Pi got its A/B designation) was supplemented with a Model B+ in 1985, with twice the memory.

https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/BBCB+6...

One of the main differences between the ZX Spectrum and Spectrum+ was the upgraded keyboard. The original had the famous mushy rubber keys but the Spectrum+ had an injection-moulded keyboard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum#ZX_Spectrum

So with a nod to both the 500+ and Spectrum+, it's a pretty apt name.

I guess its Pi 1200 next then?

Apollo A6000

Acorn Archimedes 400 series, and the 500 series that followed it (in practice only the A540). The original ARM workstations.

The single board computer Pi naming scheme is based on the BBC Micro (Model A, Model B).

As for the 'plus' - Acorn A7000+ was the last of the Acorn desktop computers to be released.

There is a heavy Acorn influence with Raspberry Pi, for good reason.

Don’t forget that ARM was originally the Acorn RISC Machine.

And the co-creator of ARM, Sophie Wilson, still works for Broadcom - the company which bought part of the remnants of Acorn (Element 14). This is where Eben Upton worked before going off to start the Raspberry Pi foundation.

Jack Lang was involved in the Pi, having also been involved in Netchannel, the STB company which used the Acorn technology and had funding from Hermann Hauser, co-founder of Acorn.

David Braben, co-author of Elite (and author of Zarch/Lander for the Acorn Archimedes) was an early Pi supporter.

Is my math not mathing today, or is that patch more than 15 lines? :)

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