Benchmarking The Raspberry Pi 400 - A Raspberry Pi Keyboard Computer

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is today announcing a new and unexpected single board computer: the Raspberry Pi 400. It's more of a single-keyboard computer that offers slightly higher performance than the Raspberry Pi 4.

The Raspberry Pi 400 is quite a nifty little device: it's a Raspberry Pi entirely within the keyboard. Thanks to the small form factor of the Raspberry Pi SBC, the keyboard isn't overly large either but roughly the size of a standard keyboard. The Raspberry Pi is cooled by a large aluminum block to act as a heatsink within the keyboard.

When the Raspberry Pi Foundation offered to send a "new toy" without any context, I just as well assumed that meant the Raspberry Pi 5. When the shipment arrived from the UK, it was in a white box without any branding... Inside a keyboard and mouse, just like the existing official Raspberry Pi keyboard/mouse kit. Hmmm, boring. Figuring it was either just an updated keyboard or they forgot to send out the new Raspberry Pi, I initially set it aside after scouring the box once more.

Going back to looking at it a day later and more closely looking at the keyboard, I then realized... Scheisse! It's a Raspberry Pi in the keyboard! Unless looking at the back of the keyboard, it looks genuinely just like a conventional keyboard. But at the rear of the keyboard are all of the same ports available with the Raspberry Pi 4 from the USB and Ethernet as well as the GPIO pins. It's all there.

Now this is much more interesting... Powered it up and we were off to the races. Powering up the unit confirmed it's the "Raspberry Pi 400." While it uses the same Broadcom SoC as found with the Raspberry Pi 4, it's now clocked at 1.8GHz rather than 1.5GHz as found with the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B.