The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced that they are beginning to ship the Raspberry Pi 5, a major upgrade to everyone’s favorite single-board computer.

Writes Eben Upton:

Behind the scenes, we’ve been working hard with our friends at the Sony UK Technology Centre in Wales (where your Pi is baked) to ramp up the manufacturing and production test processes. Things have gone a little faster than expected, and we’re happy to announce that the first mass-production units will ship to customers this week. As promised, we’ll be starting with subscribers to The MagPi and HackSpace magazines, who have taken advantage of the Priority Boarding promotion.

“By the end of next week, all existing Priority Boarding orders will have shipped, and every Approved Reseller in a country where our compliance paperwork has been signed off by the authorities will have received initial stock of both 4GB and 8GB variants, so those of you who have pre-ordered will start to see parcels arriving in your mailboxes,” he said.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is twice as fast as the last model with a Broadcom BCM2712 quad-core Arm Cortex A76 processor running at 2.4GHz. The company offers up to 8GB of RAM per unit.

The device also supports PCI Express which means you can add an M.2 SSD to your Raspberry Pi, turning it into a real storage device and speed powerhouse. And, as usual, the best part is that these cute little boards cost less than $100 – $80 for the 8GB version, to be exact. It’s a great DIY tool and it’s an actual computer that, in the end, teaches you a lot about how these machines actually work.