MNT Research Hits Back at AI Bubble Price Hikes, Parts Shortages with a Raspberry Pi CM5 Adapter

MNT Research, the company behind the MNT Reform family of open-hardware laptops and an upcoming tablet, has announced a plan to help address the increasing price of components including RAM chips and Arm processors: a "relatively low-cost" adapter to put a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (CM5) or compatible computer-on-module into any MNT Reform.

"Due to the memory shortage caused by the AI [Artificial Intelligence] industry, Arm module prices have risen and some are hard to get, causing longer lead times," the company explains in its most recent update. "To mitigate this situation, we're developing a successor to our compute module adapter RCM4, the RCM5. The idea is to offer a relatively low cost adapter for existing Arm processor modules, primarily targeting the Raspberry Pi CM5 and the Radxa CM5 with [Rockchip] RK3588S2."

The MNT Reform laptop range — which started with a chunky throwback design with trackball and now encompasses a sleeker, more modern machine dubbed the MNT Reform Next as well as a netbook-inspired sub-notebook called the MNT Pocket Reform — is designed to be as open as possible. It runs on open-source software, while MNT releases the design files for everything from the motherboard and the computer-on-module (COM) boards that slot into it to the keyboard, trackball, and chassis.

As small-production-run products, though, the Reform family has always been relatively highly priced compared to proprietary designs of equivalent performance — something which the AI bubble's unslakeable thirst for computer and memory components has not helped, with spot pricing skyrocketing over the last year. MNT's short-term fix: a new interstitial board that adapts Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 and compatible computers-on-modules for use in MNT Reform motherboards.

"Lucie [Hartmann, MNT Research founder] has been hacking on a test to validate the Radxa CM5 (using our existing the RCM4 adapter) to see if it works in the MNT Pocket Reform," MNT Research says. "They got MNT's Debian-based system image to boot. Almost all features are already functional, such as Ethernet, NVMe, USB 2.0, internal display, microSD, eMMC, and System Controller. Sound doesn't work yet due to the RCM4 missing I2S on the pins, but this will be a quick fix for the next revision."

At the same time, the company has announced progress on the upcoming MNT Vector — a 7" Linux-powered tablet made available under the same open-hardware licenses as the laptop models. "New touchscreen samples for the MNT Vector, our 7 inch tablet, arrived — and they are great," the company says. "This is still the beta version, but we're glad we found a non-rare touchscreen that works and feels nice."

More information is available on the MNT Research blog; at the time of writing, no launch date or pricing had been announced for either the MNT Reform CM5 adapter nor the MNT Vector.