Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed The Raspberry Pi 5 arrives in October with both a leap in performance and an incremental price rise. But will you be able to get your hands on one? Originally aimed at hobbyists and educators, the Raspberry Pi has evolved into a serious bit of kit over the years despite its diminutive size. The latest generation has continued …
It’s an ARM ecosystem. Of course they are not going to break their line of compatibility for feeble RISC V cores.
If they do a RISC V then I expect it will be a separate parallel line, but Pi V development has been several years and £15 million so I doubt they have the capacity yet.
Their customer base are generally not interested in windows but many are. Fortunately most are mature enough to be tolerant of other interests.
anyone here remember netbooks?
I not only remember them, I still have a working one - an EEE PC 900. It never ran Windows though - started with Linux, now runs 32-bit FreeBSD with XFCE.
Yes, it's underpowered as hell, but it's very small, and lightweight enough to hold in one hand while I type with the other while it's plugged into a ethernet switch as I debug networking problems.
Me too. Never mind though, the later "souped up" expensive ones that Windoze users "demanded" were still underpowered compared with slightly less expensive full laptops. Just about managed to run Windoze XP + 1 application if you were lucky.
Even though the orginals were "underpowered as hell", I still managed to run Eclipse and Glassfish at usable speeds (probably not at the same time, but not 100% sure now) on my 2nd gen. Asus Eee PC (1GB RAM).
EEE PC 900 [...] underpowered as hell, but it's very small, and lightweight enough to hold in one hand while I type with the other while it's plugged into a ethernet switch as I debug networking problems.
Mine's going strong, too. I've upgraded it though, doubling the RAM, installing an mSATA adapter for more & faster internal storage, and dual-band USB Wi-Fi.
One of the nice features is the 12V power input. Powered directly from my car with a $1 plug adapter, instead of a $30 power supply with voltage conversion. Maybe USB-C PD will make this cheaper.
So small it drops right in a duffel bag, no protective case needed.
Not my first time around with netbooks though. I kept a 486 Compaq Contura going for a lot of years, right up until the EEE PC arrived on the market actually. What good is a large, high performance laptop that you don't have with you because it's too bulky to always carry around with you? Couldn't justify the ridiculously expensive sub-notebook prices before the EEE... I'm a bit rough on them.
Oh, yes, I remember netbooks. I liked the idea. So did some people online. Everybody else I met had some other views, views like "But the screen's so tiny", "but the keyboard's so cramped", "but that software is so different", "but the system's so slow (under Linux, it was, because they were trying for cheapness)". Linux users weren't universally supportive either, because the screen was just as small, the unusual keyboard was even more likely to affect people typing code or using a terminal, and they tended to like having ports (so do I, but I'm slightly less likely than the average Linux user to refuse to buy something that lacks an RJ-45 port). As a result, they didn't buy one. That was a bit disappointing to me. However, the few modern reincarnations of the idea are still out there, and while more expensive than I'd like, they run pretty well. That includes running Windows 10 or 11 as well as Linux, and I have done both. Windows was not the only thing that kept Netbooks from being as popular as those who liked them would have preferred.
Everybody else I met had some other views
The worse of which was "it doesn't do video editing well". Unfortunately, being unable to do what they were never intended to do, pressure was applied to turn notebooks into things they were never meant to be which were effectively killed off for the audience who wanted what notebooks offered.
>” Oh, yes, I remember netbooks.”
The concept was good, implementation, crippled by both Microsoft and Intel left much to be desired.
What delivered the decisive blow to the netbook was the iPad.
Given modern hardware, it should be possible to have a decent performing netbook that can run full fat Linux or Windows, that is more than equal to the iPad at an iPad price.
Remember netbooks? Yep my better half loved her little Dell Insprion Mini 10 - running ubuntu. This was back in 2009 and it was significantly cheaper than the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 she currently uses. Small, light and powerful enough for the needs of the time - no idea why anyone would force windows on the same hardware (though they did) . Would I put windows on my Pi400 - nope as Win 11 seems to use a lot of resources even at idle (I have 2 windows machines and 2 linux machines). I understand people trying though not me, I sometimes have enough trouble with windows on machines that are supposed to support it......
Yes, I started out freelancing without a pot to piss in on a Netbook. Most of them ran Linux. The ones that had proprietary GPUs (Poulsbo) didn't sell very well.
I went through several different netbooks starting with the original EEE PC...all the way to an Asus netbook. Can't remember the model, that had an AMD GPU in it and an Atom CPU. That was the first one I used a desktop environment on...for the most part I was CLI only on netbooks...which turns out was probably the single best decision I made at the time because these days I am the Jesus Christ blackbelt Rocky Balboa of CLI-jitsu which gives me a massive edge over garden variety techies.
If not for netbooks I probably would have never made it as a freelancer. They were cheap, available everywhere and they ran Linux like a champ...so you could get started and kit yourself out for peanuts.
In fact because of my year or two spent using netbooks exclusively, it has influenced my workflow to this day because I still try and squeeze the absolute max out of whatever I buy.
If I was starting out today, and had peanuts to spend on kit, I'd likely do it with a Raspberry Pi.
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Oh, that's why every Windows machine I've ever owned can be erased quite easily and have my choice of Linux installed on it? If Microsoft was going to lock down computers so I couldn't do that, they've had about three decades to try. The only times they got anywhere close were the Windows RT ARM devices (dead) and the current Windows on ARM devices (you can still install Linux without them blocking you, but the Linux probably won't work because ARM).
If Microsoft was going to lock down computers so I couldn't do that, they've had about three decades to try.
They've tried, far more times then you're willing to admit. They've been taken to court over such behavior, and even an anti-trust trial where they were almost split into multiple companies.
They had a lot of success for many years telling OEMs they had to pay the Windows license fee for all systems sold, even if with an alternative operating system, making it much more costly NOT to include Windows.
They had some success making ACPI locked-down to Windows, to the point that Linux systems have to report themselves as "Microsoft Windows NT" in order to operate on just about any PCs. Bill Gates got caught red-handed writing a memo on that topic trying to sabotage other OSes: "Maybe we couid define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others".
Would you like more? As I said, there's a whole DOJ antitrust lawsuit full of material.
I'm aware of the Windows tax, and I tend to avoid paying it when I can. Still, that's not the same as locking down a computer, where they could have done a lot more things, probably quite successfully. I think Gates might have tried to do it had he remained in charge. He was more willing to pursue a monopoly and more aware of the technical requirements to do so. However, he didn't remain in charge and the locking down didn't happen. Microsoft had important roles in several areas of firmware standardization where they could have put locks. Those locks aren't there.
But maybe that's not for lack of trying, maybe Intel just wouldn't let them. Let's consider the hardware Microsoft makes. That's the area where they can do whatever they want to lock them down. It wouldn't be hard at all for them to make sure that a Surface would only ever run Windows. After all, they're writing the BIOS, firmware, everything. I've had a Surface running Linux, and the steps to do that were plug in USB drive and select it in the boot manager. Microsoft could have also been sneaky and made sure that drivers weren't supported under Linux if I did that. No, everything worked perfectly out of the box. Microsoft even developed some phones, first with Windows Phone and then with their two-screen Android things. We're talking about a market where nearly everybody is locking them to only boot the manufacturers' version of the OS, not even letting you change that without hacking. Did Microsoft gleefully adopt this strategy where it wouldn't be noticed among the ten other companies doing the same? No, both the Nokia phones and the Surface Duo have been unlocked and a frequent target of people hacking them to install other operating systems, from the people who managed to run Windows 11 on a Duo to people using them to test mobile Linux.
Microsoft doesn't do everything well and I have plenty of complaints about them. Painting them as a constantly evil force in defiance of years of experience does not help.
The only reason they have never managed to lock down machines is that Linux always finds a way. Every now and then, new "security measures" are deployed that make it difficult to install Linux for a short period of time...Secure Boot was one of them...that was designed to make it seem like you were making your device less secure if you disabled it to run another OS...I would go as far as to say it made it deliberately difficult for third parties to get keys recognised by secure boot...because for a while, Microsoft was the only organisation that had any legitimate secure boot keys...even if distro maintainers wanted to implement secure boot, they couldn't because it was virtually impossible to get keys...because if I recall, it was Microsoft who was responsible for issuing them.
> Oh, that's why every Windows machine I've ever owned can be erased quite easily and have my choice of Linux installed on it?...
Yes, AFTER you paid for a Windows license. (Yes, there are machines w/o Windows but you have to hunt and buy high.) Billy Gates only wants you to PAY for Windows, he don't care what you RUN.
Choice is fine, but when it turns into a back room deal with exclusivity and technology emerges to lock options out, it's no longer a choice.
This is what happened with netbooks.
Microsoft absolutely crapped themselves when Netbooks first arrived and they got blindsided...cheap, low cost alternatives to low end bloat machines with Windows. That's a pretty big market for Microsoft to lose a chunk of.
It wasn't long until we got Netbooks with chips in that just wouldn't work with Linux...the Vaio T series comes to mind initially...which was a great laptop, but an absolute pain to run Linux on because of the shitty GPU it had. A GPU that was amazing on Windows, but shit just about everywhere else...that shit show of a GPU was an effort by Intel that was outsourced to PowerVR who partnered with Microsoft. The result was an extremely proprietary chipset that only ever had proprietary binary drivers and zero support outside of Windows Vista. You couldn't even use that chip properly on XP or Windows 7.
I had one, and ran Linux on it from a compact flash card plugged into a CF to IDE ZIF adapter...SSD before SSD was a thing...it performed exceptionally well if you were fine with command line only...which I was at the time...but it ran like a sack of shit otherwise.
It's a shame, because if Sony hadn't fucked themselves, that form factor would still be alive and well...but that was an era when Sony consistently shafted itself in a number of ways with various devices it put out. Anyone remember the first Sony Android Tablet? I do, form factor...great...screen...amazing...battery life...solid...software support...fucking hot garbage.
Does he not know his customer base
The clamour for stock over the last year or so suggests they do.
Personally, I think the Pi Zero 2 is probably the pinnacle of the original concept and that the Pico is actually a better fit (or would be with better support) for many of the low-cost IoT applications for which the PI was originally touted. I find the later Pi models to fall between two stools - too expensive for tinkering and too many compromises for high-end performance. But I presume people are not buying them in large numbers simply to stuff in drawers, so I'm happy to accept I'm a (small) outlying data point.
It seems there's a Pi to suit every level of performance, and/or wallet. It's easy (and cheap) enough to start with a Pi3 and go up or down to find the level of performance that your project requires.
For £5 more than a Pi4, the Pi5 offers significantly more performance and expansion potential, but if that's not required then the Pi4 may still be the better option. I run a headless Pi4/8GB booting from nvme and that's perfectly fine for my needs, maybe I'll take a look at Pi5 once the software and hardware (HATs) has matured.
I personally find the Pico support to be exemplary.
Agreed. I've never bought a Pi, and never really contemplated doing so; if I had more space for projects and time to spend on them I might well get one, but as it is I don't really have any justification for it.
But I see articles in places like Hackaday all the time where people have done something interesting with a Pi as the controller or whatnot. Clearly they're working for a lot of folks, so I don't see any reason to complain.
I love Raspberry Pis but they always have the uncanny ability to just fall short of what they could have been due to some really weird design decisions...
Firstly, why keep the USB 2.0 sockets on modern boards? I know there might not be enough bandwidth to have 4x full speed USB 3.0...but that's fine...I'd rather have 4x USB 3.0 ports that can all function faster than USB 2.0, even if fully populated they cannot reach full USB 3.0 speeds...because even crippled, USB 3.0 can be faster than USB 2.0. and not all USB 3.0 devices require the full available bandwidth...like WIFI adapters etc.
Secondly, releasing the Pi Zero 2 with Micro USB...wtf?
Thirdly, I think the Foundation should spend some time researching common use cases for the Pi Zero...because it is mostly used to make hand held devices...and really ought to come with a LIPO battery connector on board or at the very least, they should consider producing a LIPO board that sandwiches onto the Pi Zero from underneath...many third party solutions exist, but none of them are quite right form factor wise and quite a few are "dodgy" to say the least and usually come with at least one drawback...be it that the battery is directly soldered on, a crappy on/off slider switch, really whacky dimensions etc etc.
Finally, a model "C" that drops two of the USB sockets for a second ethernet socket.
I think we're reaching a point where the Pi Foundation has to "pick a path" because while they continue to pursue being "alright" at everything, they're losing market to boards that are very good at specific tasks...because ultimately Pi Foundation could find themselves in a position where their device is no good for anything...which is a sad prospect...I personally don't want to see the Raspberry Pi become that device that is only used by people that want to built a Retroarch, home media, Pi Hole.
> No open sourced RISC-V processor? Not interested.
Moving to an entirely new architecture and having to rebuild all the existing software tooling? Colour me equally uninterested.
> And courting Micor$oft...??
I th1nk y0u m34nt m1rc0$oft? Gotta love 90s l33t speak.
Beyond that, the article notes that "Upton praised the enthusiasts who had coaxed the software giant's flagship operating system to life on the platform"
Praising hobbyists who are doing their thing isn't exactly the same as courting Microsoft. You might as well say that iD games are courting Brevell because someone's ported Doom over to a toaster...
> Does he not know his customer base at all?
RPi has delivered a device which is more than twice as fast as the previous model with full (barring the loss of audio/composite ports) backwards compatibility.
And the launch price for the Raspberry Pi 4B with 4GB of ram in 2019 was $55. Which is roughly equivalent to $66 in 2023 thanks to the recently rampant inflation.
https://www.theregister.com/2019/06/24/raspberry_pi_4_model_b/
So arguably, the new 4GB model at $60 is actually slightly cheaper than the old model!
Overall, it's shocking how much RPi doesn't understand their customer base...
"And the launch price for the Raspberry Pi 4B with 4GB of ram in 2019 was $55. Which is roughly equivalent to $66 in 2023 thanks to the recently rampant inflation."
And even the original Raspberry Pi was £25, which is about £37 in todays money, so considering the upgraded speed, number of cores and RAM, it's a pretty reasonable price still.
Original Raspberry Pi - single core @700MHz, 256MB of RAM.
Current Raspberry Pi5 - 4 cores @2.4GHz, 4 or 8GB of RAM
Yeah, it's pretty hard to argue with the higher price point, and if you want, you can still order a 512MB model A+ from Rapid for 16 quid +VAT, which is less than half the price, in today's money than the original Pi was at launch!.
I've made much the same point elsewhere...
Almost 15x the performance (based purely on CPU speeds, before architecture improvements) for around twice the (dozen-year inflation-adjusted) price, and given that lower cost variants are presumably on their way? I'll take that punt (in time, let's see if they have really solved the supply issues first...)
Ahh the old ThreadX chestnut.
So, let me explain. Broadcom when they developed the original Videocore firmware bought a licence for ThreadX from the writer. AIUI, a lifetime licence, it never expires. No royalties or anything like that. Raspberry Pi have modified that firmware many many times over the last 10 years, but no royalties to pay. Many years later the writer of ThreadX sold the thing to Microsoft.
But Pi are still using the Threadx from BEFORE the purchase. It's never been updated. AFAIK, Pi pay no licence to MS, take no code changes from MS, in fact, have nothing at all to do with ThreadX from MS at all.
The continued use of this to bash Pi is disingenuous at best.
And just to put some icing on the cake, the Pi5 has a massively reduced firmware (as much as possible is moved to ARM/kernel space). It now does very little.
There aren't RISC-V soc chips available in volumes that would equal to A76 in performance yet. Also Linux distribution support for RISC-V SBC computers is work in progress, there're development releases but not yet stable, matured releases.
RISC-V will get there but it's not there quite yet. Rpi's decision to stay in Arm architecture for the pi5 is very understandable.
Yes, ironically I've finally got my hands on a Pi 4 - not the one I ordered back when the world was young and was never delivered. As for power supply - I'm still waiting for that, thanks to Amazon's complete inability to deliver and order and a correct locker code at the same time. (Yet more business Amazon lost to eBay.)
PS If Jamie from The Pi Hut is reading this: 1. It gets thoroughly annoying having everyone who sells something following up with an email touting for feedback/reviews 2. Try looking at your email in plain text and decide if that's the impression you really want to give 3. Opt-out on emails that were never requested is BAD. 5. Spamming from No-reply addresses is WORSE. 6. Note to self - never order from Pi-Hut again.
Probably not. But then neither will the Pi4 in my experience. It just doesn't have enough pull to be used to stream video at even 1080p, never mind 4k. The user experience is absolutely appalling. Even opening firefox can take upwards of 10 seconds at times, and youtube is basically unwatchable, with constant video-audio desync issues.
I've often wondered if there's something wrong with mine, because as far as I can tell it's totally unusable for video.
I have a Pi4 4 GB running Libreleelec (Kodi) and connected to a TV via HDMI. It sees a mounted drive shared using Samba by another Pi4 NAS on my home LAN. The NAS is connected to the router with Ethernet; the TV Kodi one uses wi-fi. I can stream even 1080p x265 material stored on the NAS with NO glitches or any noticeable problems at all. I get a lot of stuff by putting on an eye patch and going -oo-arrr me hearties'.
FWIW, X265 is far more efficiently compressed than, for example, X264 for the same quality, which can help on a wireless connection too as there's so much less data to send to the Pi. Having the Pi capable of x265 decoding in hardware is a big performance benefit both on the decoding side and the data transfer side :-) In the early days of the Pi4, neither Libreelec nor OSMC had the hardware decoding for x265 running yet and it was a bit iffy with some stuff, especially at 1080p.
> since lost focus and is pricing itself out of the low power market
You know the Pi5 supports suspend mode with power consumption of 4mW?
And when fully powered and active it's using single digit Watts.
If there's more efficient hardware available then you were probably never the target market.
I didn't know that, and it's good to hear if your summary is correct in all cases, because it addresses a large sector where the Pi has been unsuitable. Specifically, the Pi has always run pretty badly when you need it to be powered by a battery. Power consumption at idle wasn't low enough to avoid quickly draining a battery, but the only lower power mode was to completely shut it down, meaning that resuming from that would require waiting through the whole boot process and you either needed to build in an RTC or be confident that you'd always have networking so you could have the clock working. This is why, for example, I never bought one of the Pi-into-a-laptop products; they'd all advertise three to four hours of battery life and deliver two. I did build several battery-powered Pi projects myself, and in order to get them to last long enough, I ended up having to put in a battery so heavy that the portability aspect was sacrificed.
I really don't understand this comment that comes up all the time.
It's like I go to the shop for orange marmalade and someone suggests peanut butter as an alternative.
If I want to be part of the Pi movement, there is really no point in buying a second hand x86 with a PSU 10 times bigger than the Pi and a power consumption to match plus a noisy fan.
It all depends on what your motivation is. It sounds like your motivation is "I want to be part of the Pi movement". That is not necessarily others' motivation for buying a Pi. They might just want a small computer for a certain task, and for that motivation, there are many non-Pi computers in existence which they'd consider. If they're not specifically attached to the Raspberry Pi's products as the only option and only consider things that they can run Linux on, it is much more logical to compare options for price, performance, power consumption, etc.
I'd also point out that "the Pi movement" is kind of vague. What counts here? Does someone else's SBC count? It's still ARM, Linux, open source, low-power*, easy prototyping, but it's not the Raspberry Pi's product. What if the Raspberry Pi company built something completely different? Would that be part of the movement. The term is so vague that it kind of sounds like the argument of someone who only ever buys Apple products and always will just because Apple made them, but I'm guessing that's not what you intend. I may not be a participant in the movement simply because I don't understand what it is.
* The power consumption of boards like this may also be the reason people are considering X86 boxes in the same category. Yes, the Raspberry Pi will be consuming less power than refurbished boxes, but not so much less that it changes how you would use it. If you include others' SBCs in there, they usually consume more power than the Pi does.
Obsolescence statements are published from day one and show incredibly extremely long support lifecycles. Raspberry Pi units originally released in 2012 are still being supported in production until at least 2026, giving you a minimum 14 year lifespan for online use cases. Most of the competition barely scrapes the 7 year mark for software support and rapidly iterates between hardware releases, very quickly producing piles of modern e-waste. In the case of second hand x86 components, the only hardware which competes at the Pi price point is already EOL at the point of sale with firmware related security issues going completely unpatched.
If folks want to use their hardware standalone without a network stack, then in many cases, they’ll be doing their bit for the planet by grabbing some other commonly-available second hand boards instead of a Pi. But for those who want production-ready ELTS hardware with rich software support for an incredibly cheap price, there really isn’t any competition out there right now.
Loss of the audio jack I can understand, it will affect some uses but USB DSP support isn't a big hurdle and the older Pi types can more than cover any audio usage anyway, The fan header is a good inclusion, it'll impart less of a Heath Robinson look to my future projects.
The surprise for me was when i spotted the 'power button', I've not seen any details as to it's operation on the Pi website - does the Pi5 default to booting when power is applied out of the box like all previous PI? Can it be bypassed?
The analogue audio output quality- via that jack- was quite poor anyway. IIRC this was due to design/cost constraints and tradeoffs since only a small proportion actually used it.
So it's not entirely surprising - nor as big a loss as it first appears- that it's been sacrificed completely.
Good point, but- to be fair- I never meant to imply that its removal was no loss whatsoever.
Only to make clear to those who might otherwise have been forgiven for mourning the loss of "standard" analogue interoperability that it was already a bit too much on the grungy side (and IIRC low level) to be usable for many things they might otherwise have wanted to use an analogue output for. (*)
I didn't think its removal was a surprise, because if they'd considered it that important, it probably would have been higher quality in the first place. But I can understand why it wasn't.
Everything else being equal, I'd still rather it had been left in (and I assume it probably would have been if they hadn't needed the space on the board).
(*) e.g. audio output to an old CRT TV (like my Trinitron portable) for multimedia or listening to music through some sort of speaker system.
Get a cheap i2s amp, $1-3 (aliexpress-amazon), same as you'd use if you had a pico/esp32, but enable the linux driver and you're golden. High-quality stereo audio on the cheap
https://todbot.com/blog/2023/05/16/cheap-stereo-line-out-i2s-dac-for-circuitpython-arduino-synths/
https://blog.himbeer.me/2018/12/27/how-to-connect-a-pcm5102-i2s-dac-to-your-raspberry-pi/
The shortage of stock over the last few years made me re-consider using rPis in a couple of home situations. If you need a headless/fanless board for a very specific function, then the price-per-watt might still be worth it. It's not even that small in footprint when you factor in the cables sprouting out of every direction
However on my home "management server" I tried attaching an SSD via USB-SATA enclosure to my 4GB Pi 4 to make updates/installations slightly less IO-bound vs MicroSD or USB-3 stick. Despite recommended/compatible USB 3 chipset, I had no end of problems with the power envelope of the Pi. With a powered USB hub as well the thing ended up taking out 2 plug sockets and wires everywhere... not a family-approved application.
I eventually just bought a Lenovo ThinkCentre M93 Tiny with Intel i3 "T" CPU (office refurb on ebay, £35). When comparing the power usage, the full x86 box with more RAM and expandability idled at 9-12W and my Pi 4 idled at 4W. For some applications such as ARM development, GPIO/electronics tinkering, or a truly fanless requirement then it might be worth paying the Pi premium. But IMO if you need cheap but still vaguely efficient home compute for some headless home server/NAS tinkering, then for most people a cheap refurb x86 thin client is probably more flexible and cost-effective.
And at the other end of the scale, for embedded/IoT type things there's plenty of cheap boards available now. ESP32 or Pi Pico will fill that niche nicely.
In my mind the Raspberry Pi was revolutionary, but they now seem to fall into the standard business habit of having to release a new version regularly that's faster, hotter, more power hungry and more expensive... to the point that they seem to be trying to compete with 'desktop' PCs which ignores the aspect that made them popular to begin with.
Zeros and Picos were less powerful, there's the CM versions, the 400 was a different form factor, and some updates to the earlier models were released with the same thing in a smaller size or sometimes with less memory or only added wifi or more GPIO pins.
The official power supply now delivers up to 27W even though Tom's Hardware could only make a Pi 5 use 7W when stressing it and changed the configuration so it drew 0.05W when in standby.
I run a home mediaserver... It's complete overkill for what it is. But mass storage was a factor and upgrades to other systems meant it's been given a few upgrades over the last few years.
So now it's rocking a Ryzen 7 3800X, but underclocked and undervolted. So it's running a base of 3ghhz and 1.1v, 32GB ddr4 3200mhz and a cheap RX550 4gb gpu.. along with 8HDD's and a SATA expansion card.
It idles along at around 60w or less, no monitor on it as I remote into it for everything. The most I've seen it require is about 95w when accessing video and transcoding something across the network.
Considering my house idles overnight at around 100-150w in total with the server powered 24/7, 3 fridges/freezers and various other stuff on standby... I can live with a few extra kwh on my bill each year. I worked it out to perhaps £8-10 a year.
Unless you're generating your own electric, you might need to redo that calculation. At 60W continuous, you're using 525kWh per year. if you're paying £10/year it means your electricity must be about 2p / kWh.
My electric bill for that "low powered" server would be *fifteen* times higher, some £150/year.
Considering the Pi is moving further towards being a mini computer than a tinker board with every new version, why are they keeping the same footprint?
If they had increased the size by 1.5-2.0 times you could have the 3.5mm audio again, you could have full sized HDMI and negate the need for those damned adapter cables. You need a new case anyways, why not a slightly bigger one?
Personally I would like them to switch to a modular approach. They should create compute boards the size of the pi zeros with solderless connectors and then you could buy the standard or 3rd party accessory boards which would have the combination of ports you desire. Then you could upgrade your system by only replacing the central module. Having to change all your cables and cases for every new version is really annoying. especially switching to micro HDMI so you can fit two on board when most people only want one full sized connector.
You don't have to keep upgrading. You can just buy what you need and replace it if it fails.
From the Raspberry Pi website "Obsolescence Statement. Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ will remain in production until at least January 2028"
It's worth noting that they have said the commercial/industrial control markets in effect subsidises the hobbyist/home user side thanks to economies of scale. So bringing out a newer, faster model every 2,3,4 or so years to keep up with commercial demand, filters down to us home users. I've still got an original Pi B running, a couple of 2's and a "spare" 3B+ that got replaced with a 4 because the 3B+ struggled a bit with 1080p video and craps out if said video is X265.
> Considering the Pi is moving further towards being a mini computer
You mean like a PDP-11? I'm sure a RPi can already comfortably outperform one of those in its sleep.
> why are they keeping the same footprint?
Because if it was the same size as a PDP-11, I'm sure those hobbyists would get a far less cooperative response from their spouses when they brought it into the house!
I prototyped an app I had compiled on a Pi W2 and compared it to running on 2GB 4B, it had about 40% of the performance of the 4B for a few concurrent web front-end connections to a SQLite database. I may have slipped a decimal point, but a quick Google lookup and a simple calculation suggested that the W2 has about 4,500 times the MIPS performance of a DEC VAX 11/750 that I used for similar work in the mid 1980s...
...and it took their rocket scientist engineering design team only twelve years to figure out how to design that in; an "on-off" switch, for chrissakes.. However, given all their other engineering-design disasters, about par for the(ir) course, though.
And, of course, just as with all their other fuck-ups, such as not being able to copy the reference designs directly from the manufacturers' data sheets for a simple power circuit, and USB communications circuit, Eben Upton has always been quick with what he thinks are valid excuses...
So, Eben--tell us, for the record please: why has it taken you twelve years to add an "on-off" switch?
So, Eben--tell us, for the record please: why has it taken you twelve years to add an "on-off" switch?"
Possibly because it's not an "on/off" switch. It's an ACPI power management function that can be used with a mechanically actuated sensor to act as a sleep/hibernate/off/on switch under software control so as to do a clean mode switch by, for example, shutting down or suspending OS and App services in a correct and data safe manner. It's little more subtle than just pulling the power or manually running shutdown command. And it's quite a long way from being an essential, "must have" since the aforementioned shutdown command and pulling the power works just as well in most cases :-)
Personally I think this was a dud anyway. The quality really wasn't up to much, and I quickly found even the cheapest USB units gave significantly better results all round. Never tried any of the hats - they all seemed far too expensive for what they were.
With such a USB unit I found the Pi4B could run complex MIDI tracks in a full-fat soft-synth, so this one should be even better.
So it's now a mini mobo for running linux and, in the near future, windows!?
When the scope is reduced to, as seems BTL and in the article, running a hand crafted media centre or just some limited desktop variant then I think it's somewhat lost it's way.
I get to use ARM ST32 variants running Betaflight and INAV on 20x20mm flight controller boards for quads and for something micro-controlling or low power data logging in some fashion would likely see me looking for a PIC, maybe the ones with a BASIC compiler added(sweet!) or something Arduino like.
'This is not the hobbyist board you are looking for!'
The performance you seek is in smaller, cheaper, lower powered Pi variants
Like PCs, the form factor of Pis has stayed much the same but what's under the hood has changed - and putting it in context the Pi4 CPU was a power hog compared with many of its brethren even at time of release
Pi1 currently being used with GPS puck as time server because …. Virgin Media. Ok so I’ve now found their working time server ntp.virginmedia.com but it’s antisocial of them to block everyone else’s. Also seeking a Pi to display digital signage replacing an old PC running Ubuntu Core; likely a Pico 2 is the thing.
"Ok so I’ve now found their working time server ntp.virginmedia.com but it’s antisocial of them to block everyone else’s."
Really? Since when? I had no idea VM had their own timeserver, and none of my kit seems to have an issue using others, or at least not that I've noticed.
"my old 3B+"
If that fails, or you need another one, the 3B+ will bre remaining in production until Jan 2028. I didn't check for other models, but I assume the 4 range will stay in production for some years to come too. It's not like most OEMs where they end production of the old work horses every time new shiny comes out. I imagine that's because they now have a large commercial market who want long term stable hardware and that mean products (and low prices) remain in place for us consumers too.
The Cortex-A76 is a five year old design that has been surpassed by five (!) generations of ARM Cores (A77, A78, A710, A715, A720) in the meantime. It seems strange to me to start a new design in ~2021 based on that old core. Economic constraints don't seem to make sense, we're talking about literally cents and the more modern designs on a more modern manufacturing process would actually produce smaller chips with a lower power draw.
But I've never really understood why they have to create their own chip designs to begin with. There have always been enough designs on the market. And don't try to make this about Open Source or Open Hardware, the Raspberry Pi's still have considerably worse upstream support than many other boards and their company policy also actively prevents everybody else from making clones.
I don't miss the audio port. However, I wish they would fix the standard OS so it worked with USB sound cards adequately - mic in especially a pain. IMO an option of having Jack Audio Connection Kit instead of Pulse Audio would fix this. Yes I use Patchbox OS to fix this, but would much prefer Raspberry Pi foundation to supply this in their standard build OS.
Desktop performance based on some video reviews up looks much more like it, it'll just about play 1080p 60fps youtube out of the box (I imagine some mild overclocking or tweeking will sort that), but I see they're still using a weird power spec - 5v, 5a - so I can't run it reliably off one of the multiple USB PD chargers I have that stick to the spec of 5v/3a. Yeah, it'll probably run fine 90% of the time, but that one time I idly plug in a USB HDD and it craps out due to power issues will be the one time I could really do without that happening, etc.
I know that it would require additional componentry to step down from say, 9v 3a, but as with all these things it means one more plug socket, which means in my case, having to replace a mains extension from being four gang to six gang etc - so the cost of £60 for a 4gb would actually be more like £75-80 when you take the custom power supply and a decent quality new mains extension into account.
I'm still rocking a 3B so it'd probably be a worthwhile update (Especially with the CPU and IO performance improvements, which are useful and healthy) but I think I'll wait a bit and see if the stuff I plan to use it for (media centre/emulation) is equally improved - not much in the way of comprehensive reviews on that as yet, and it'd need to be properly good to justify it.
A big swing and a bit of a miss IMHO, but a welcome update to keep the Pi (and it's bloody good ecosystem) in pace with the competition I guess.
Steven R
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Queue a load of pitchforks from those who just managed to get a 4 after months of waiting. “ If you’re hoping a new Raspberry Pi will pear in 2023, we have bad news: Rasbposs Eben Upton says work on a Raspberry Pi 5 won’t start until the second half of the year, meaning delivery is a way off yet.”
https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/21/no_rpi_5_2023/
I'm probably talking out my ass here - not uncommon - but I always viewed the Raspberry-pi as a device where raw computing power was secondary.
Yet here we are with another set of stats about the cpu and gpu power being x times better than the last iteration.
The problem? as I see it, is people trying to use the Pi for things it wasn't ever capable of doing with performance.
Computing that didn't suit the form factor nor spec.
Are the creators chasing that market? I don't know. I guess they are simply utilising compute power for each iteration in terms of cost - the same price point x years later takes advantage of what's available at the time.
But still, the idea persists that the raspberry pi is capable of all tasks at a low price point - sure, it is, but not at speed.
I kinda wish the direction was more attuned to the original excitement.
Expand on the versatility, rather than focussing on raw gpu/cpu power. Focus on what makes it great - low power, portability, small form factor, edge cases, iot etc.
We see people trying to use the pi for compute power that really doesn't add up at all.
Heck, at that point, a slightly bigger form factor - just get an intel NUC or something.
If you aren't into the maker game, using the Pi as a low power useful device for robotics or home automation etc. - you soon realise that for maybe $50 more you can get 10x the performance.
You no longer get blinded by the low price point and realise the Pi isn't actually for _you_
Yet here we are, the focus is just faster cpu and gpu, rather than on what the original intent was.
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It depends what experiments you want to run. If you're just interested in learning how to use Docker, you can do that on your computer without having to have much RAM in it. If you want to create distributed systems with it, then your laptop will not be great no matter how much memory it has* but Pis would work pretty well. If you want to run something that needs a lot of RAM, then unless it already supports using distributed nodes with less memory, the Pis won't be able to run it well and you'll want to get more RAM in a single, powerful device to run that.
* Yes, you can experiment with distributed systems by creating a bunch of VMs on one machine and treating them as nodes, which will work as a simulation, but it won't give you the real thing like a cluster of SBCs would.
The last thing needed is yet another board running Windows. It's just too bloated for small applications. I'm not worried about losing standard jacks as I can bring out what I need if the functionality is still on-board. What I don't need for any of my projects is a GPU since I'm going to access the device remotely and need better energy efficiency so battery operation is much simpler. Less heat generated is also a good thing so I don't have to bother with elaborate sinking designs.
There's a ton of small scale applications for a computer where cost and functionality are more important than speed. I could really use gobs of digital I/O and analog inputs. Something like the DIAMOND-MM-32DX-AT PC/104 card except much cheaper.
"Just because YOU see no need for this, doesn't mean others won't."
There are already tons of options to choose from and if everybody is pushing their platforms in the same direction, the only difference will be price. I already use 3G cell phones for general computing stuff.
I'm still on a year+ waiting list through my country's official vendor for the pi4, so excuse me for not being excited that a new version of this little miracle machine is coming out. Will I even be able to snag one? Doubtful if current availability trends continue. Unless I feel like getting scalped like there's no tomorrow on Amazon, I see no reason to be excited about the existence of a new (potentially chronically underavailable) Raspberry Pi until the current supply issues are sorted out.
"I wonder if they'll offer a drop-in motherboard upgrade for the 400?"
No, they won't. There is no part that can be reused. The only thing you could possibly reuse there is the keyboard, but the rest of the system's all in one piece. Even if they made a 500 (or whatever) mainboard, you'd probably have to cause some damage to the case to get it in, and the mainboard would cost about the same as one in a plastic shell with a whole new keyboard on top. This is probably a good thing, because if they do make a 500, they have a chance to improve on the design of the 400. At the very least, they'll have other interfaces that it would be useful to provide somehow but the 400 case has no provision to do.
They could, but for a few reasons, it wouldn't be any better. I've covered some of them in the comment you replied to. For one thing, look at a Pi 400 teardown. It's not easy to take apart the 400 without breaking something, meaning manually swapping the board is not a process people will want to do too often. It's possible, but the last thing they need is to have a lot of complaints about the board breaking when someone tried it.
The second reason is that there's basically nothing that gets reused. I have a Framework laptop which has swappable motherboards. When you buy a new motherboard, you're keeping a battery, case, screen, audio system, ports, and quite a lot of stuff really. If you swap the motherboard of a 400, the only thing you're keeping from the old one is the keyboard, and it's a pretty basic, cheap keyboard, and a plastic shell which are really cheap to make. There's little advantage to the user in keeping those things when you could have a new keyboard and your old 400 still works.
The third reason is that the new Pi is more powerful. I could see them making a 500 with a faster storage facility using the new interfaces on the board, but if they did that with a 400 motherboard, there would be no space for the new hardware and possibly a heat problem. Redesigning it to attach up the new interfaces would also let them change the design somewhat. For example, one of the complaints about the 400 was that the USB 2.0 port was on the left side and some people wanted it on the right for a mouse used by right-handed users. If they made a new version, they could easily move that or even have two of them, and since they'd have to redesign just to add the things the Pi 5 can bring, it would let them find some new design options.
If the Raspberry Pi 400 was named after the Atari 400 as has been claimed, then surely its big brother should be the Raspberry Pi 800. Or- as a new and updated "next gen" version- the 600XL or 800XL?
"Also, if Eben sticks to his earlier hints about naming, it might be the second time in my life I own an integrated-keyboard home computer designated "500" :)"
LOL, and the 4 series is already capable of running FS-UAE and emulating an Amiga 500. A Pi5 should be even better at it, maybe even cope with A1200 emulation at full speed :-)
I have been waiting since the announcement of the Pi02w until 3 days ago when mine finally arrived!! I wanted it for my Retroflag GPi case for smoother GBA and psx emulation, which it does nicely. I wonder how long the backlog will be with this board in real world years?
Until the Pi4 there was a HW video encoder. That's been dropped on the Pi5 but apparently a single core can do 1080p60fps encoding/decoding just fine at better quality than the Pi4 HW could manage (see: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/#comment-1594055)
First, the RTC can run off a supercap as well as a battery - which is fantastic for anyone wanting to box and forget about the units (not to mention the benefits for anyone who might be shipping boards with RTC clocks on them, as it lets me, ahem, them remove an expensive chip from their BOM)
Second, the custom power chip they codeveloped (with Renesas) is capable of delivering 20 amps. That is f*ing insane, so much so I would presume it was a typo if it wasn't on their site. I don't know what voltage the chips run at to need that, but I hope it's very very low.
Third, "Raspberry Pi 5 consumes significantly less power, and runs significantly cooler, than Raspberry Pi 4 when running an identical workload." - genius. I presume that's what you get for for going from 28nm to 16nm.
But forth, and I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this - because it has PCI-e, it also has an M.2 adapter board in the works. There's a picture of a prototype the bottom of https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/. Given how many times Pis have been announced here and commenters immediately respond "yes, but I want to connect proper storage", I'm kind of surprised this wasn't highlighted.
The launch article on their site is a good read. Looks like a lovely piece of kit.
EDIT - they're also hinting at their in-house custom PIO chip having IO abilities which "will be exposed" in the coming months. Proper off-loaded hi-speed custom IO, here we come! Whoop whoop!
The RP1 chip they're using for this is extremely interesting and there's already been questions on the option of having the chip available separately. It seems it is basically a PCIe peripheral to IO breakout chip, which could mean it could be used to put direct high speed IO on a PCIe card too, which could potentially be a game changer in many applications.
(from the launch article: It (the RP1, red.) provides two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 interfaces; a Gigabit Ethernet controller; two four-lane MIPI transceivers for camera and display; analogue video output; 3.3V general-purpose I/O (GPIO); and the usual collection of GPIO-multiplexed low-speed interfaces (UART, SPI, I2C, I2S, and PWM). A four-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface provides a 16Gb/s link back to BCM2712.
> Second, the custom power chip they codeveloped (with Renesas) is capable of delivering 20 amps.
Do you know what voltage the USB-C port requests/accepts? Because from the looks of it (no inductors in sight) it is still 5 volts, which would be disappointing, because we'd still need short/thick cables that can carry a high current without too much voltage drop.
5V (max 5.1) at 3A, with limited power to the USB sockets. If you want more than 600mA to the USB ports (for high power peripherals like external HDDs) you can use a USB-PD powersupply that supports 5V 5A mode. I REALLY don't understand why, if they have implemented USB-PD they didn't choose a chip capable of accepting 9, 12 or even 20V input.
(From the introduction article, tucked away under the power supply header:
"When using a standard 5V, 3A (15W) USB-C power adapter with Raspberry Pi 5, by default we must limit downstream USB current to 600mA to ensure that we have sufficient margin to support these workloads. This is lower than the 1.2A limit on Raspberry Pi 4, though generally still sufficient to drive mice, keyboards, and other low‑power peripherals.
The white 3-pin UK variant of the new Raspberry Pi 27W USB-C Power Supply, pictured with the cable tightly wrapped with a cable tie and the pins facing towards the viewer
For users who wish to drive high-power peripherals like hard drives and SSDs while retaining margin for peak workloads, we are offering a $12 USB-C power adapter which supports a 5V, 5A (25W) operating mode. If the Raspberry Pi 5 firmware detects this supply, it increases the USB current limit to 1.6A, providing 5W of extra power for downstream USB devices and 5W of extra on-board power budget: a boon for those of you who want to experiment with overclocking your Raspberry Pi 5.")
..really not that long after individuals could actually buy Pi 4s again but apart from that, it's all good stuff.
You only used the audio port if you were desperate - having a low spec audio out was a design compromise and everyone who wanted better used the HDMI out or one of the excellent HAT audio solutions.
I'd love to know what the actual demand for two HDMI outs is vs high quality audio out via a 3.5mm jack is though.
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