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qwertox
teamonkey
The blog post says they're releasing a M.2 hat in "early 2024"
mintplant
I don't love that you'll have to choose between PoE, M.2, or active cooling / a case.
danbee
You won't have to. They can all be stacked.
CTDOCodebases
You don’t have to as long as whatever devices manufactured have a PLX on them. This adds to the cost though.
sillysaurusx
Fwiw I bought a sleeve for my M.2 SSD and it plugs into usb3 with very little slowdown. It gets 500MiB read and 1.2GiB write. Haven’t measured vs native M.2 to compare, but it’s fast enough that I’d be surprised if the pi were blocked waiting for I/O vs native M.2. And native M.2 comes with increased manufacturing complexity.
LtdJorge
Are you sure it's 1.2GiB? The RPi comes with 5Gb/s USB ports, which is 596MiB/s
Now that I think about it, Linux may be caching writes, but even then double the write speed compared to the read speed seems weird.
sillysaurusx
Oh, I didn’t test on a pi, just a mac. And yeah the double write speed was super weird. Thanks for answering my internal question about why ~500MiB seemed to be the max.
undefined
proxysna
Same with orange pi5 and 5b. Having an option for a faster and reliable storage is amazing. SD cards are great when you prototype or need just enough storage to netboot a device, but past that it is limiting.
schappim
This would limit you to just connect SSDs. Their solution opens up more versatile access to other PCIe devices.
mastax
In addition to the ability to adapt M.2 slots into PCIe via an inexpensive adapter, there is a growing ecosystem of M.2 cards for most of the things you'd use a PCIe card for. USB controllers, SATA controllers, Ethernet controllers, FPGAs, even display adapters.
ltbarcly3
It would not limit you to just SSDs, the m.2 connector on the rk3588 devices generally exposes 4 pcie lanes and an adapter to make this a full pcie slot is already available. So really an m.2 nvme connector is the best of both, you can turn it into any other pcie connector you want via an adapter, but you can just put an nvme ssd directly on the board without a hat.
15155
The best part about M.2 E key is that it does not require +12V.
HankB99
The CM4 exposes a PCIe 1.0 x1 (Not sure about the revision) lane and can boot from an NVME SSD. It will be nice to have this capability on the Pi 5 with all of the other connectors (except for audio.)
heresie-dabord
I recommend booting Pi 4 and Pi 400 from external (USB) NVMe in an enclosure.
antx
Indeed, but it's somewhat of a hassle. Having everything integrated on the board, or in the same case, is nicer.
HankB99
YIL a Pi 4B can run from a directly connected USB/NVME SSD. I've been using USB/SATA SSDs and all I have tried require a powered hub. Do note that I don't just just boot it up and proclaim "It boots - ship it"[1] I thrash it with various disk benchmarks and stress tests to be absolutely certain the SSD does not disconnect due to insufficient power.
[1] I suppose this is the H/W equivalent of the S/W engineer's proclamation "It compiles - ship it!" And I guess this dates me since S/W is pushed rather than shipped these days.
Fnoord
On a CM5, a lite or one with eMMC would suffice in combination with NVMe. I have CM4 with eMMC and use SATA w/them.
ur-whale
> A NVMe compatible M.2 M Key connector
Yeah. The Lichee Pi 4A has one of those under the board, it's really useful.
I wouldn't even blink if they completely jettisoned the MicroSD slot, these have proven to be a giant PITA over the years (slow, unreliable, etc...)
I really don't understand why they would miss that.
comboy
MicroSD allows for a really low cost deployment (availability issues aside), especially when PXE is not suitable.
ur-whale
Good luck doing "deployments" on SD drives and still have it run 6 months later, especially in environmentally unfriendly environments. Theses horrible little things die all the time, even when you buy supposedly high quality ones.
sitkack
For the low cost route, boot off USB flash drive.
stkdump
No word on price. When Raspberry Pi first launched, this was the prime feature of the thing. Can we expect same price as the Raspberry Pi 4? (at the respective RAM level)
Edit: found it here: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
So the 4 GB model is 60$, which is 5$ more than the 4 GB model of the Raspberry 4 when that was launched: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-... . I guess that is fair, especially with inflation nowadays. So they stay true to the idea of making this available for cheap.
Archelaos
> I guess that is fair, especially with inflation nowadays.
The accumulated inflation in the US since June 2019 is c. 17%.[1] This means US$ 55 in June 2019 is "worth" c. US$ 64.35 today. So it seems that you get a 4GB Raspi 5 for c. 7.25% less today.
The "US Real Average Hourly Earnings" have increase by ca. 22% in the same period, from US$ 27.75 to US$ 33.82.[2] So an average person needs to work c. 12% less to buy a 4GB Raspi 5 today.
However, I think the issue is more complicated: There is inherent deflation in electronics, which is included in the inflation rate. you can observe it when looking at the current price of a 4GB Raspi 4 at Amazone, which is c. US$ 67. So if the introductory price for a Rapsi 5 is really going to be US$ 60, you get something better for more than 10% less now.
[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...
[2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/realer_07112019.ht... and https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t19.htm
Dah00n
Amazon is not a good place to get prices from for a comparison. All the enshittification has ruined the prices. As it forces prices up outside Amazon too even outside prices are not useful. To do a proper comparison that doesn't include changes forced by Amazon IMO you need to look at non-US non-Amazon non-Amazon-sellers prices and work with those. Quite annoying really.
naikrovek
I've seen the word "enshittification" three times in three days now, and it is already rubbing my last nerve raw.
we make fun of business jargon and buzzword fads, and we do it just as much as anyone else, and it sickens me.
grrowl
Worth mentioning Raspberry Pis are designed, and in most cases built and assembled, in the UK.
wredue
Please stop using “average” for wage comparisons. It’s an utterly useless metric for showing if wages are moving or not.
If you must use average, then you should remove the top 5% from the average.
sapiogram
> If you must use average, then you should remove the top 5% from the average.
5% is too arbitrary, just use the median.
reissbaker
"Real Average Hourly Earnings" is already an adjusted metric to make sure that it's not skewed to the top earners (hence why it's called "Real Average" and not just "Average"). In the linked post you'll note the following explanation of what "Real Hourly Average Earnings" means: "Data relate[d] to production employees in mining and logging and manufacturing, construction employees in construction, and nonsupervisory employees in the service-providing industries," which apparently covers roughly 80% of private sector jobs in the US.
runeks
> The accumulated inflation in the US since June 2019 is c. 17%.[1] This means US$ 55 in June 2019 is "worth" c. US$ 64.35 today. So it seems that you get a 4GB Raspi 5 for c. 7.25% less today.
Included in that 17% figure is the price increase for e.g. corn, rent and steaks.
Why should the change in price of either of these things be relevant to the price of a Raspberry Pi?
handsclean
How else would you define how much a dollar is?
agloe_dreams
My gripe is that the original Pi cost $35 at launch and while they have made a better Pi...They have not made a Pi at that price ever again, even accounting for Inflation. Furthermore, increased power consumption and features have added big price jumps to the required Accessories. Now you need miniHDMI adapters rather than more common HDMI, you need cooling, you need more expensive power adapters. a fully set up Pi 1 was simple USB, SD, and HDMI All possible in a $50 budget or less if you had some stuff. Now you are $90 in to run it.
regularfry
I don't see how this is true. $35 in 2012 is roughly $47 today. You can get a pi zero 2 kit today including the adapters, case, and PSU, for $49.95. Just the PSU, which the original didn't come with, is worth more than the $3 difference.
Besides, both the pi 3 and the pi 4 were $35 at launch, so they were actually beating inflation when they were launched.
fanf2
Raspberry Pi 4 1GB available to buy for $35 https://chicagodist.com/collections/raspberry-pi/products/ra...
mrguyorama
Do the modern Pi Zeros not compete with the original Pi at a stupid low price?
agloe_dreams
Not really, the small size adds the need for all kinds of adapters to have the same functionality.
HankB99
It depends on the use case. I have several I put around the house with sensors for IoT stuff. ESP32/8266 (and newer) devices would probably be less expensive since they don't need an SD card but are more work to program. The Zero has a full OS with dev tools built in. But for running a desktop, they're not so good.
They're not as cheap any more at $15US for the Zero W. I miss the days when Microcenter had them on sale for $3.14US on Pi day. They did recently have them priced at $10 to celebrate the grand opening of a new store.
bmurphy1976
The Pi Zero 1 performance is pretty bad and it doesn't support 64bit OSes (so no Ubuntu). The Pi Zero 2 looks pretty decent for the price, performance should be ok-ish and it'll run Ubuntu... if you could actually get one.
leidenfrost
Apple showed them that an ARM desktop is totally possible. And also that making the pi 2x or 3x times faster would make a great arm linux desktop.
It's more like they're expanding their top line.
martijnvds
$60 for the model with 4GB of RAM and $80 for 8GB.
It's mentioned in Eben Upton's blog post (linked from the announcement):
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
sillysaurusx
Sure, if you want the raw board and nothing else. I spent $100 for a starter kit that had an enclosure and some heat sinks. It came with a controller for a retropi installation too which was a nice touch.
crossroadsguy
[flagged]
vor0nwe
You’re aware that ‘they, the fruit sellers’ isn't very distinctive in this context?
nmz
Not to mention it now requires a new PSU. Before you could use your standard $5 (android) phone charger at (5W), then you had to buy a 15W one and now a 27W.
To whoever thinks pi's are cheap, you can get more functionality out of a used laptop for less money, but probably worse specs and probably x86.
dfox
The standard charger is 2.5W, not 5W, and RPi3 will happily run from that, for RPi4 2.5W is somewhat marginal, but it will still work. I suspect that RPi5 is going to be somewhere around 3W (non-PD USB3).
The official RPi specs intentionally overblow the power consumption in order to provide an buffer for powering whatever ridiculous stuff people may hang off the USB ports.
Then the other issue is that all RPis need somewhat tighter voltage tolerance than what is in USB specification. So it is perfectly possible that a cable between the power supply and RPi is compliant, but has too large series resistance on power lines for RPi. And well, powering RPi from random aliexpress-grade “Android chargers” is completely another bad idea.
BHSPitMonkey
The old standard Pi PSUs output up to 2.5 amps (not watts), which at 5V gives you up to 12.5W.
Older boards with simpler workloads could usually manage at 1A (5W) but it was always preferred to have at least 2A (10W) to work with.
flyinghamster
But, you really only need the 27W supply if you need to pump a lot of power through the USB ports. It'll run just fine (even using less power) on the 15W unit with more modest loads.
stranded22
Engadget has the price at $60 for 4gb and $80 for 8gb.
https://www.engadget.com/the-raspberry-pi-5-uses-the-company...
column
The value proposition is there for me. I bought a "BMAX B1 Plus" for about 70$ including shipping from AliExpress. It's as small as 2 or 3 CD cases stacked together. It is a fully fledged PC that comes with windows 10 (no support for windows 11 but LinuxMint and other distro work well too), an hdmi cable, and a clever mounting bracket to attach it to the back of a monitor. It is passively cooled, pulls about 4 Watts. Biggest downside is the power supply with a cylindar connector. I use it solely to connect to my main PC using RustDesk and it is great for that.
voytec
> No word on price.
They link to multiple regional reseller sites [0], where prices are available. I see €73.90 (€60.08 pre-tax) for the 4GB version and €97.50 (€79.27 pre-tax) for 8GB in Poland.
schappim
Raspberry Pi 5 4GB - US$60.00 (EAN 5056561803319)
Raspberry Pi 5 8GB - US$80.00 (EAN 5056561803326)
Citizen_Lame
Cheaper to buy in the US than the UK.
SmallDeadGuy
It's exactly the same before tax: £59.30 GBP incl VAT ~= £49.42 GBP excl VAT ~= $60.29 USD
lonjil
Presumably due to higher taxes on sold goods in the UK?
DrBazza
We're not called Treasure Island for nothing.
UncleSlacky
As is tradition.
jamesdhutton
I am curious to know how people here use their RPIs today, and how the RPI5 might help. I have had a model 3 for many years, which I enjoy tinkering with from time to time. I still haven't gotten over the novelty of having such small, cheap computer that runs Linux and does a pretty good job of it. That said, all I do is tinker with it. I turn it on, write a bit of code, marvel that the code runs, and turn it off. I've bought a couple of hats which are fun too, but again it's just tinkering. I'm curious to know who here has found "serious" applications for their RPis.
op00to
Until my home automation got complex enough to justify a faster, more capable machine, I ran all my home automation stuff on an RPi.
I use RPIs as "data collection" units. I have one RPi outside with a cheap SDR to pick up all the neighbor's weather stations, which I dump to a MQTT queue and use to populate weather data in my home. I use another to collect GOES satellite images.
I have 3-4 RPis that act as "Digital Ham Radio Hotspots", basically bridging my local ham radio via the internet to other stations. I use an RPi 4 as my "to-go" computer when I do ham radio in the woods. I use an iPad as a screen, and it works just as good as a laptop.
I have an RPi sitting in my garage as a second nameserver. The primary nameserver is in the house "data center".
I have an RPi plugged into my stereo receiver as a streaming device that lets me stream audio from my phone to the stereo.
I have 4 RPis connected togehter in a k3s cluster, for fun. IT doesn't work great. :)
I have two PiKVMs. They are truly awesome.
... I think that's it.
rrrix1
Why is ns2 in the garage? Everything you said makes sense except for that.
op00to
Geographical distribution. If the left half of my house is destroyed by natural disaster, I’ll still have a working name resolver on the other side!
Seriously, it’s just because I may do something else on that Pi that I want it on that side of the house. It’s my only garage Pi. My main internet handoff is in the garage, but my main “datacenter” is in a basement room on the other side of the house.
It’s all for fun. :)
sedawk
[dead]
Slartie
One is monitoring my trash bins in the backyard and generating visual output of emptying times, current location of the bins, alerts if they are still in the backyard but are scheduled to be emptied tomorrow (in which case I need to move them to the street in the front). This has been running on a Pi with Bluetooth (monitoring uses BLE beacons) for over five years now, with very little maintenance necessary.
Another one runs the home automation hub (Homematic plus some addon stuff). Also very little maintenance, basically just doing backups and an update a year or so. Has been in place for several years as well. I often forget that this thing exists at all, as it just chugs along quietly, never needing reboots or anything. Even the updates are unnecessary unless I want to use some new sensor or actor that the old hub software doesn't yet know about.
And then there are two Pis connected to TVs in the living room and kitchen which run OpenELEC/Kodi for media center tasks. Started doing this when the first RPi came out and frequently used back then, these Pis are rarely used these days, as most streaming now involves commercial streaming services and is done via FireTV sticks. But I still have a private library for the occasional exception of stuff that's not offered on any commercial service, and that library is accessed via the Pis. Fortunately, aside from a reboot every few months and very rare updates, these Pis are also very low maintenance.
gokhan
Nice one. Trash Train is also interesting.
op00to
Trash reminders - awesome!
Larrikin
Discovering DietPi was kind of a game changer for me. I had the original Pi 1b that basically sat in a drawer after the first month I got it.
I went over to a friends house last year that had a more modern Pi and they had a PiHole on their home network. It was pretty amazing being able to block ads on my phone near totally and not just in Firefox. New Pi's were completely impossible to find but my friend said give DietPi a shot. The benchmarks on my Pi after installing were complete crap, processes took minutes that took a few seconds on the more modern Pis, but AdGuard Home worked flawlessly.
It sent me down the rabbit hole of Tailscale everywhere, self hosting what I can, getting a NAS, and just opened up to me how simple it is to set up these kind of services now that are accessible everywhere.
I recently was able to get a Pi 4 (one week before the Pi 5 announcement of course) and am looking forward to a setup where I can run services that need hard drive access on my NAS and hosting the quality of life apps on the Pi.
zamadatix
I've been using one for https://pikvm.org/ and it's been a rare case of "the Raspberry Pi is neither ridiculously overpowered, ridiculously underpowered, or even beat out by any off the shelf solution at all let alone at the same price or point". It's literally the best IP KVM I've ever used or owned. The use case is almost a perfect match for the exact hardware capabilities of the Pi: hardware encoding, video input, gigabit network (with Wi-Fi alternative, which has saved me a few times), GPIO, USB OTG, the hat system, open source web KVM software which doesn't suck ass and sit untouched for 13 years with endless security vulnerabilities piling up.
sangnoir
Things I've used mine (plural) for at various points in time, in no particular order: Wireguard & ssh entrypoint into my home network. Pi hole. Kodi. Calibre ebook server. Orchestrating turning on/off IP-based lightbulbs or plugs (since I'm too cheap to get a gateway for ZigBee/Threads/$IOT_protocol) - automatically turning on my Christmas lights at sundown daily after querying an API for my local Civil twilight time was good fun. "NAS server" connected to a cheap 5-disk USB JBOD device. Hosting a low-intensity crawler that ran into blanket IP-range black-listing issues when hosted on cloud-providers. Hosting a Gitea/Forgejo server: I no longer star projects on Github - I mirror them locally and keep them synced, storage is really cheap now. Periodical syncing my backups from NAS to cloud. As a digital "tape recorder" for broadcast radio using FM receiver, aux cable, and USB sound card. Twitter Spaces recording for time-shifting conversations I wanted to listen to later; I beat Twitter's "record" feature to the punch! Twitter crawler/archive bot for a niche community.
Wishlist projects: getting alerted when my home loses electric service or internet connectivity, using UPS and LTE modem. "Calendar dashboard" site that displays the household's schedule for the day on a tablet/jailbroken kindle. A lazy-loading reverse-proxy Caddy API server that will keep the connection open while it turns on my workstation in the background if it's off. Archiving tweets using mitmproxy to passively scrape Twitter's API responses while I use the official mobile client.
Basically anything that I wanted to automate and was not demanding on compute would get assigned to a Pi.
SamuelAdams
I think the Pi 5 would be well positioned to be a free, OSS media box. Android TV and Google TV are very popular today, along with Roku, Apple TV, etc.
I installed PiHole and noticed that every single click of my Roku remote gets sent to Roku’s servers. PiHole blocks this of course, but there was nothing I could do to disable this telemetry on the Roku device itself.
Google TV is slightly better - there’s options to adjust targeted ads, and an “app only” mode, but there’s still usage and other data sent to Google. Also you can’t use it at all if you don’t sign in with a Google account.
I haven’t used other platforms.
But I would like to see an easy to use, easy to configure, OSS streaming box. Now that this can do 4k60 and HDR, it might just work for things like Netflix, Plex, and other services.
Right now the best products on the market for high-bitrate streaming are Apple TV and Nvidia Shield Pro. I wonder if the RPi 5 can compete with that?
ohthehugemanate
There's no shortage of projects for this, particularly enby, jellyfin, and kodi spring to mind. The only real challenges are GPU transcoding support, app selection for integration of services like Spotify, amazon prime streaming, and netflix, and app availability on client devices like TVs.
In terms of specs a Pi4 was already beefy enough for this use case, fwiw. But the software stack is hard just because no one seems to target the "set top box“ space quite the same way. There are client/server media platforms to compete with plex, there are single.box media platforms, there are set top boxes to compete with roku, and every possible mix in between.
Phrenzy
I have 4 pi4's running HiFiBerryOS. They connect to my Roon VM. I can group them together & they will play the same song in sync.
I have a pi4 running OSMC with the Plex addon attached to my television.
I've got about a half dozen Pi 0 W's with addon sensors that inform my Home Assistant of the temp, humidity, PM2.5 level, and CO2 levels in each room.
I just ordered a CM4 to run the PiKVM board for my homelab server.
I also plan to monitor and water my plants using Pi 0 W's.
I just ordered a Pi4 for running BirdNet, to identify birds in my area.
I would also like to work with ChatGPT to identify people and/or birds around my house.
thegarliccheese
You could switch out the Pi 0 W's with ESP32's or Raspberry Pico W's (if you'd like to stay in the Raspberry ecosystem). They're a lot cheaper, require less power, have a smaller footprint, aren't too hard to set up and there's usually a library ready for every sensor.
foresto
When the Pi 2 was new, it was one of the few single board computers that properly supported fractional frame rates, which are often needed for smooth video playback. (Many films are encoded at 24000/1001 fps rather than exactly 24 fps, for example.) I assume the newer models still support this, since they're still built around VideoCore chips.
A faster model would allow decoding at higher resolutions and frame rates, even when the codec in use doesn't have direct hardware support.
With the PCIe support in this new model, it could also make a decent home file server.
ShadowBanThis01
But oddly enough, they don't support some screen resolutions: https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1202#issuecom...
PrivateButts
TBH the thing I hate most about this category of SBC is the reliance on SD cards. They are both too unreliable to trust and so slow that they often bottleneck the SBC. Buying them is often a crap shoot too, I've purchased cards batches of cards from the supposed reputable manufacturers that were all over the board when benchmarked, and rarely did they hit the claimed speed spec. I would love if there was an alternative that was not as much as a jump as those SSD flash drives or NVME drive. Maybe OS grade eMMC M.2 drives the size of those wifi cards?
foggywin
Did you read the blog post? :)
"One of the most exciting additions to the Raspberry Pi 5 feature set is the single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface. Intended to support fast peripherals, it is exposed on a 16-pin, 0.5mm pitch FPC connector on the left-hand side of the board.
From early 2024, we will be offering a pair of mechanical adapter boards which convert between this connector and a subset of the M.2 standard, allowing users to attach NVMe SSDs and other M.2-format accessories."
tlamponi
> Did you read the blog post? :)
As you keep spamming this here, did you read the HN Guidelines[0]?
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
pseg134
The guidelines mention that.
undefined
Koshkin
[flagged]
gherard5555
[dead]
betamist
[flagged]
PrivateButts
Did you read my comment? :)
I did read that they were going to support M.2., and I have gotten around my issues with SD cards in the past using SSD-grade USB drives and NVMe adapters. My comment was about how crap SD cards are, and how this class of SBCs (including the PI 5) often use them as their default storage (as in, not needing an adapter or special firmware to boot). My final statement was my wish for a high speed durable storage standard that was better than SD cards without having to spend more money than the SBC itself on storage, although looking today on Amazon it seems that NVMe drives have gotten way cheaper, no idea of those are quality though.
LeoPanthera
You can netboot a Pi. Every Pi in my house netboots. I have a whole bunch of them. Some play games, some play videos, some play music, and a few other minor things. Because they all netboot, you can change what each one does by renaming a file on the server and then rebooting it. It's great.
undersuit
Every new Pi model needs a bit of time for the Netboot firmware to be worked out. I would research the RPi5 before you bought it today.
PrivateButts
Are they using like a RAM disk then or are they mapping a network drive for storage while they're running? I've always been curious about setting up netbooting but beyond a failed experiment a long long time ago I haven't really tried.
rullopat
You made me curious: what do use them for exactly?
LeoPanthera
One is the "smart" part of my smart TV. One powers my hifi. One connects my non-networked printer to the network.
One is an NTP server which gets the time from GPS, although that one will probably be retired soon, internet time works fine.
I used to have one inside a MAME cabinet but I upgraded it to a "real" PC because the Pi isn't really powerful enough for modern versions of MAME.
op00to
What sort of issues do you see from netboot vs. booting of a USB SSD?
reedlaw
Do you have a guide or any tips on how to do this?
_vOv_
It's called PXE boot.
You need a server to host the ISO (via http/ftp/tftp or whatever you prefer) and a DHCP server that will distribute the ISO URI to the client.
Configure the client to boot from the network in the bios and put it in the same LAN as the dhcp server.
That's the gist of it.
sixothree
You can even boot from USB
liminalsunset
This device has a PCIe 2.0 x1 connector now, so NVMe drives should be usable now.
The Compute Module 4 series have been able to support eMMC chips, so I don't see why they wouldn't continue with the 5 if/when it shows up
mlyle
> This device has a PCIe 2.0 x1 connector now, so NVMe drives should be usable now.
It's a fiddly FPC connector though, which isn't a great contributor to mechanical robustness.
martin_a
Oh yeah, I've lost quite a few camera projects to these connectors with cables breaking, slipping out of the connector and whatnot. Maybe just a bad choice of cables, not sure.
Kirby64
FPC is used in billions of devices with perfectly fine robustness. As long as it isn't part of some flexible mechanism (e.g., a flex display, or something folding), it should be just fine. If you toss it into a box with the FPC flopping in the breeze then I'm sure it would be terrible, but... don't do that?
yjftsjthsd-h
FWIW, I boot my Pis almost exclusively from USB. Not that that's... great in terms of speed or reliability, but it's something.
rebelpixel
This. I've had an always-on Pi 3 since 2016 and after countless random corruption issues from various micro SD cards, I moved to booting them from old USB2 flash drives, first an 8gb then an 16gb one. Never had an issue with them and they've been solid. I only had to mess with the flash drives when I had to do an OS upgrade.
Also, those micro SD cards were always fine after a format/partition and I can still use them in other devices just fine. I've read before that the Pi has a tendency to corrupt micro SD cards through its reader, and IIRC it's related to power issues.
op00to
For my Pis that change, I try to boot form USB. For Pis that don't change, I just make their / immutable.
heresie-dabord
I have a Pi 4 and Pi 400 and boot them from NVMe (via USB).
Combined with a portable LCD, it's a low-power dev workstation on a battery. ^_^
stevenhuang
Reducing logging, logging to ram and writing to the sdcard once a day helps longevity a lot, especially with quality sd cards.
99% of the time it's the verbose logging of application servers that is the culprit of sdcard failures.
vGPU
Agreed. I recently had the rather unpleasant discovery that when samsung called their SD cards “high endurance”, they actually meant 3-6 months, and that half of the video on my dashcam was missing.
corn13read2
Why aren’t you talking more about the GPU?
corn13read2
wow how does no one get this pun from his username?
lrem
I've recently stumbled upon a SBC with a M.2 slot... Then promptly closed the tab, to stop the temptation to get another shiny dust collector. But they exist.
imtringued
NVMe SSDs are so cheap now that you are literally wasting your time by not using them.
bpye
I see that the PR against the Raspberry Pi linux repo is out [0]. Interestingly they are introducing a BCM2712 defconfig with a 64k default page size.
From the device tree [1] it looks like they've rolled their own IOMMU rather than using ARM's SMMU which is annoying.
[0] - https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/pull/5618
[1] - https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/blob/9c75e5408c01cb7c65...
fanf2
Interesting. Did the earlier Raspberry Pi Broadcom SOCs not have an IOMMU? If they did I would have expected the 5 to be compatible with older ones.
bpye
I'm fairly sure that none of the earlier SoCs had an IOMMU. It's of course possible that there was one hidden in the GPU or something, but nothing on the CPU side.
proompter5
What would be the benefit of having their own IOMMU instead of just using the ARM SMMU?
lukeholder
Jeff Geerling rundown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBtOEmUqASQ
rgovostes
There's also a writeup: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/testing-pcie-on-raspb...
geerlingguy
And a bunch more test data: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/21 (includes some notes on power consumption, etc.)
MikusR
I wish you could add Syncthing Hashrate. It's logged on startup.
Single thread SHA256 performance is 64 MB/s using crypto/sha256 (64 MB/s using minio/sha256-simd). Hashing performance is 56.63 MB/s
Thats on Raspberry Pi 400.
pluto_modadic
[flagged]
shlubbert
You've gotta back up claims like that with at least some kind of citation or it just comes across like libel.
Calvin02
Just did a few searches using his name + politics. His blog was the first link. It appears that he is a devout catholic and opposed to progressive policies.
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futureshock
I think it’s notable that the chip powering the RP5 is built on a 16nm process. (The RP4 was on 26nm).
This is a nearly 10 year old manufacturing process and it’s silly to compare the performance per watt to any Intel or Arm chip on the market today. On such an old node, it’s not surprising that the power draw is so high. Of course an M2 would smoke a RP5 at a much lower power. But the RP5 is 60 bucks!
TheMode
Is there any high end 5/7nm SBC? Phone chips don't seem to escape the phone market.
spatular
Orange Pi 5, "plus" version also has 2gen 1-lane pci-e (M.2 wifi), and 3gen 4-lane pci-e (M.2 SSD) and 2x2.5Gbit ethernet.
8nm, pretty power efficient. I've measured it to run at 0.7A@5V idle and 1.2A@5V with all 8 cores loaded with md5sum /dev/zero; iirc it had 1 ethernet connected, no other periphery. Running on Armbian.
doubled112
I have the non-plus and have been pretty happy with it.
A lot more computing power than the Pi 4 and older home server it replaced. The M.2 slot was an absolute game changer. Real onboard storage is a must.
It runs a few low resource VMs in the garage and I almost completely forget it exists.
Matsta
Rockchip's rk3588 is on 8nm: https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/12/16/rockchip-rk3588-data...
ac29
Alder Lake N (N95, N100, etc) is built on a 7nm class process. Many of those systems could be considered SBCs (SoC/RAM/Storage is often all on a single board). Those CPUs are low end for x86, but much higher end than a typical ARM based SBC.
InvaderFizz
The N100 is quite good all things considered. It generally beats an i5-6500t in pretty much anything while having very low power draw and all the newest media engine encoders.
moffkalast
Side note, lowering the process means smaller wires and more susceptibility to ESD. I've never vacuumed a Pi 4, but also haven't lost any to it in countless sketchy mounting points. That might change on the 5, GPUs built on 10 nm and lower just die if you touch them wrong.
bmicraft
GPIO is now connected to the RP1 I/O controller which is on a 40nm process, so that should actually be an improvement
fulafel
You'd be surprised how low-end the average chip with ARM core(s) is.
YetAnotherNick
You'd be surprised to know how hot the RPi gets. My Rpi CPU is basically untouchable because of temperature even when only desktop is running idly.
rldjbpin
process node only matters that much when you are dealing with the latest system architecture. whether you compare with rockpi's offering or with apple, A76 is a design from 2018.
nfriedly
A number of vendors seem to only be showing 4GB and 8GB units for $60 and $80, but https://vilros.com/collections/raspberry-pi-5/products/raspb... has 1GB and 2GB variants for $40 and $50 respectively.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/ says "LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM (4GB and 8GB SKUs available at launch)" so maybe the cheaper ones will be coming at a later date?
Unrelated to that, the addition of a power button seems like a significant improvement over previous models.
rasz
Cant wait for first 2 to 8 GB ram swap hack. Power button is nice, but implementation in custom PMIC once again means its unrepairable https://hackaday.com/2023/03/24/dead-raspberry-pi-boards-pmi...
foresto
You can see 1GB and 2GB jumpers in the photos, so it seems reasonable to expect these models to show up eventually.
rldjbpin
while i was personally working with 512 mb with my rpi all this time, i wonder if there is a point to having only 1/2 gb with the new soc.
even if you run the sbc headless and never touch the gpu, you risk starving the threads for things where it would be an upgrade over the previous models.
sixothree
How cow! You can buy them?!
nfriedly
Not yet, but you can pre-order them from some vendors. The 4 and 8gb models should ship in October.
FWIW, the Pi 4 and Pi Zero W are both fairly available these days. The Zero 2 W is still in short supply, but aside from that, the shortage is basically over.
sixothree
Regardless, this represents a huge shift in strategy!
sixothree
BTW I jest, but thank you for the info.
Zuiii
I'm tired of information being vague, under-specified, or only available under NDA (if you're lucky). I'm not stupid enough to hop on this ride again.
Are there any fully open (in terms of schematics, firmware) RISCV rpi-"compatibles" out there? I'd be happy to pay triple the price of this thing for a power-efficient linux-capable sbc that is open.
peteforde
Genuinely curious: why does their announcement upset you so much?
Most of the tech world announces products, executes a marketing strategy and then releases stock into the market.
You make it sound like someone left you standing at the altar. You didn't know it existed an hour ago. If you were on a long vacation, it might have released before your return. Why get angry?
johnchristopher
Scalpers want to know if it's worth it to order en masse so they need more specs to feel the market ? shrugs
travisjungroth
I think you’re talking past each other. The “information” is the schematics and firmware of the board, not the press release and the specs.
olalonde
Isn't Raspberry Pi open source hardware?
Zuiii
> why does their announcement upset you so much?
Why do you assume this specific announcement is what upset me? Why do you assume this has anything to do with their product marketing strategy? Why do you assume I wouldn't have gotten angry even after they released the product?
RetroTechie
Any board based on StarFive's JH7110 is currently best in this regard, I think. Datasheet & reference manual for this SoC is available.
Especially their VisionFive 2 board. I've even downloaded a schematic for it (although older revision than actual board I have). And they're pretty good about upstreaming drivers.
That said: what you probably care about is documentation for integrated peripherals (esp. GPU), and existence of open source, mature drivers for those.
RPi is very good in this regard. Afaik the only binary blobs there is some GPU/SoC firmware, and (maybe) some boot code.
RPi's in general are very well supported & documented, and its software ecosystem is very mature compared to anything RISC-V based.
Could you pinpoint what you think is lacking there?
Other ARM based boards may offer more bang/$. Likely at the cost of documentation or driver support (Beagleboard being an exception).
foggywin
What do you mean with vague information? There is an entire blog post describing the product: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
iamtedd
This is pretty bad:
"Does Raspberry Pi 5 need active cooling?
"Raspberry Pi 5 is faster and more powerful than prior-generation Raspberry Pis, and like most general-purpose computers, it will perform best with active cooling. The Raspberry Pi Case for Raspberry Pi 5, with its integrated fan, is one way to provide this."
They pose a question themselves, and don't even answer it. Of course something will perform best with active cooling. Does it need it?
I don't need this wishy-washy marketing language from Raspberry Pi.
efitz
I hate it when someone answers a yes/no question with something other than yes or no.
Here’s my proposed edit:
Q: "Does Raspberry Pi 5 need active cooling?
Original A: "Raspberry Pi 5 is faster and more powerful than prior-generation Raspberry Pis…”
Better A: "For modest workloads, no. For heavier workloads, you will get better performance with active cooling. Raspberry Pi 5 is faster and more powerful than prior-generation Raspberry Pis…”
epolanski
It literally tells you that you don't need cooling, but if you add it you'll get more performance.
I don't find it hard to understand what this means: the soc limits it's core performance based on thermal conditions and will throttle when hitting limit temperature. That's standard behavior on every computer or smartphone or GPU out there.
Make temperature lower and it will clock and run at higher speeds without throttling.
M4v3R
Are we reading the same blog post? The post that parent posted literally reads:
> "Raspberry Pi 5 has been designed to handle typical client workloads, uncased, with no active cooling".
mlyle
The answer is nuanced. It can run workloads somewhat faster and cooler than Pi 4 without active cooling. But it also can't reach close to its peak performance without active cooling.
jrockway
It depends on what "need" means. I'm pretty sure you can take a 400W TDP Threadripper and run it without active cooling. It will throttle down to run at whatever speed (well, TDP) that doesn't fry it. The Raspberry Pi does the same thing.
If your goal is to get the highest score on every benchmark, then yeah, you need active cooling. That has been true on every Raspberry Pi, I think. (I don't remember if the 1 needed active cooling. I did not have any. I also remember it taking over a day to recompile Linux! Still faster than setting up a cross compiler at the time ;)
tpmx
"peak power consumption increases to around 12W, versus 8W for Raspberry Pi 4"
A beefy heatsink case should be able to handle that.
joefarish
I think they answer your question in the PSU section “Raspberry Pi 5 consumes significantly less power, and runs significantly cooler, than Raspberry Pi 4 when running an identical workload.”
m463
requiring cooling limits the use case. (remember, they've sold > 30 million of them)
I'm pretty sure what it means is that kids who use the pi on their desk don't need to spend on a cooler. It will probably throttle and run slower.
Meanwhile an adult using the pi could put on a cooler and wring lots of performance out of it.
rsaxvc
Says h265 decode, but nothing about h264. Does VC7 do h264 like VC6, or not at all?
schappim
I was lucky enough to get early access to the Pi5[1]. I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have.
[1] Youtube Video on the RPi 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_QPM9xV_sw
ThatPlayer
How's the USB-C port on it? Is it still limited to USB 2.0? I want USB 3.0 for OTG (usb client) uses.
fanf2
The USB-C port is still USB2 like the Raspberry Pi 4. Both the 4 and the 5 support OTG over the USB-C port.
trvz
Could you please run the Geekbench 6 [1] benchmark and report the results?
[1]: https://cdn.geekbench.com/Geekbench-6.2.0-LinuxARMPreview.ta...
geerlingguy
See: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/21
748 single / 1507 multi
keyle
Excellent work!
dragontamer
Beaglebone (from Texas Instruments) is more open, but still not as open as you'd probably like. Still, its a better balance than what Rasp. Pi organization has (more documents are available on AM335x, open-hardware for Beaglebone Green and reference designs, full chip specifications and the like). Beaglebone isn't really "more expensive", as much as its just "lower specs at the same price" though.
The "most open" are MPU chips and their associated "System on Module" boards. This isn't quite a SBC, but its easier to use than a BGA. These SoMs are very poor from price/performance perspectives, but instead serve as reference designs and/or prototypes to the $8 or $9 chips. The overall expectation is that you're "supposed" to be building your own PCBs eventually, so the SoM are kind of just a prototyping aid.
Most SoM provide 100+ pins from the chip as well, meaning you absolutely have to build a PCB to use them. However, 2-layer boards solder very easily to a SoM with castilliated edges (even with a hand-soldering iron)... albeit with a bit of flux and technique and practice. Its just the easiest way to deliver the most-pins of customization in the smallest space. So a relative beginer should be able to boot an SoM. The most difficult routing and Power-Delivery-Network details are already solved on an SoM, you just gotta apply power and build out the final interfaces / connectors.
Take the ATSAMA5D27-SOM1, 104-pins in a 40x40mm form factor. $50 from Mouser for 500Mhz and 128MB RAM (though fully open source and fully documented at linux4sam, and processor manual, U-boot process and everything). But the underlying SiP (MPU + DDR2 RAM) is like $15... while the MPU alone is like $8 and 128MB of DDR2 RAM is only like $3.50 in practice. Since in mass-production, you'd probably have a custom PCB anyway, that's the most expected use case. https://www.linux4sam.org/bin/view/Linux4SAM . I'd say that Microchip / Atmel's MPUs seem to be the best documented that I've found, but are unfortunately the lowest specs. Still, they also have some of the lowest power-consumption (like 200 mW or something), so really they're in a low-power class of their own. Still Linux though.
------------
STM32MP1 is the MPU from ST Micro. Like the Microchip SAM-MPU series, the STM32MP1 is available in SOM, SiP, and "raw" MPU form. Except the SOMs are like $100+, the SiP is like $50+, while MPU is $10ish.
-------------
I know NXP has a huge line of MPUs. I haven't researched them yet though.
---------------
I think all the hardware designers at this level just "assume" that their customers, if they care about "open source", are probably making their own PCBs.
If someone "just" wants a SBC (like the Rasp. Pi), there's not much point in publishing a ton of documents. People can just boot the Rasp. Pi and start messing with Linux.
-------
I got no experience with this yet. I'm just curious and am thinking of a simple MPU layout project ever since I discovered that OSHPark has 6-layer boards and KiCAD supports BGAs in practice. Overall, these lower-power lower-end MPUs fill a different niche than a Rasp. Pi ever would. But I feel like there's enough overlap that these might scratch your "open source" and "fully documented" itches.
m463
I always thought the beaglebone had a better hardware design. The thing I first noticed was the female header pins - why would the pi have pins that can be shorted out?
the beaglebone pru is cool too.
But all of that pales in comparison to the huge mindshare the pi has, which makes all the difference.
dragontamer
Maybe, maybe not.
RP4 doesn't have LoRA like the Beaglebone Play. 3mile / 5km radios can do many things that RP can never do.
older
Olimex produces fully open boards, but noting RISCV based which is capable of running Linux yet AFAIK.
yjftsjthsd-h
Perhaps something from pine64?
bbstats
So dramatic lol
filleokus
Hmm. I'm disappointed honestly, I was looking forward to USB-C with display port and "normal" USB-C power.
Is there any reasonable option with software support that comes even close to what RPI offers? I don't want an SBC where I have to use some strange back ported, super old, kernel with little to no chance of getting updates.
Maybe I should just go for an X86 board? Lattepanda Delta, or Khadas Mind whenever that's released. Not even that more expensive.
scottlamb
> Is there any reasonable option with software support that comes even close to what RPI offers? I don't want an SBC where I have to use some strange back ported, super old, kernel with little to no chance of getting updates.
aarch64-wise, not quite yet I think, but I have hope for the RK3588. https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35...
> Maybe I should just go for an X86 board? Lattepanda Delta, or Khadas Mind whenever that's released. Not even that more expensive.
Yeah, x86-64 would certainly be a safe choice if you have the budget for it. I'd add ODROID-H3/ODROID-H3+ to this list.
ThatPlayer
Pine64 makes SBCs with the same goal as their PinePhones to get mainline Linux on them. That effort expands to many boards that use the same SoC. So the rk3399 used in the PinePhone. Their newer board uses rk3588 which isn't completely mainlined yet. But I think these are the best bet for software support.
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/QuartzPro64_Development#Upstrea...
654wak654
You could also get a framework laptop mainboard with a case: https://frame.work/products/cooler-master-mainboard-case
anaganisk
Isn't the link you posted, only for the case?
654wak654
You can also buy mainboards[1] and expansion cards[2] (usb-c, hdmi etc.) from the same website. Depending on how beefy of a computer you want there are mainboards from 299 USD to 700 USD. So for ~500 USD you can get a very powerful tiny-ish computer. It obviously won't have the IO capabilities of pi-like hobby boards but it'll function great as a thin client for running linux / home automation stuff.
[1]: https://frame.work/marketplace/mainboards [2]: https://frame.work/marketplace/expansion-cards
marcosdumay
> "normal" USB-C power
I have no idea what kind of USB-C PSU one can call "normal", but allowing higher voltages would be really good.
bmicraft
"Normal" would be a voltage-current combination, that isn't likely to lead to 10% lost energy just in the cable and connectors alone.
12V @ 2.25A would have been much more sensible: With a 100mΩ cable you'd lose 1.8% instead of 10%
crote
The right choice would've been 9V 2.8A, because it's what USB PD-compliant chargers offer. For a 25W charger powering a 25W device, that's the only combination which is guaranteed to be available.
Using 5V 5A means you have to essentially use the official power brick, because very few third-party chargers support it. It really sucks.
zxcvgm
Interestingly the Pi 5 has moved most I/O like Ethernet, USB, MIPI and GPIO into a custom I/O controller chip called the RP1. It talks to the main CPU over 4-lane PCIe. They also have a custom PMIC (Dialog DA9091) with a built-in RTC and support for external backup battery. Everything else seems pretty standard.
schappim
> Interestingly the Pi 5 has moved most I/O like Ethernet, USB, MIPI and GPIO into a custom I/O controller chip called the RP1.
For cost-saving reasons, the I/O is located in the RP1 Southbridge (which has a larger process size) instead of the SoC. I had the opportunity to preview the Pi5 and have provided a detailed breakdown of the RP1's components [1]. In summary, what I/O functionalities does the RP1 manage? Essentially, it handles almost all of them.
dboreham
Just like a 1970s IBM mainframe ;)
hedora
I’m surprised they are only claiming 2-3x performance improvements for this vs. the four.
The four was great until I realized that they hung all sorts of stuff off the same bottlenecked USB controller.
I’d think moving them to PCIe would net much more than 2-3x real world improvement.
alexellisuk
Hi, I've been testing the RPi5 for a few weeks and have written up my results and benchmarks on Twitter.
https://x.com/alexellisuk/status/1707296079849365650?s=20
This is so much quicker for clusters, servers and headless use, that I don't think I'd consider buying any more RPi4s myself.
Fnoord
Good, then the price of second hand RPi4 will go down as it has been ridiculously expensive (even though I'm settled, still makes me happy for other people).
I'll wait for a CM module before I consider to replace my CM4 fleet, but for now I am happy with my CM4 as it is. Although I admit the ability for native NVMe is attractive. Better I/O as well!
Also, the RPi5 needs a better PSU so that is one thing to take into account.
For people for whom a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 is good enough, they should opt for that instead. They're widely available and no longer ridiculous prices.
alexellisuk
I've published a blog post now, with a bit more info and links to other content on the RPi 5 - https://blog.alexellis.io/first-impressions-with-the-raspber...
ndsipa_pomu
Are those results available anywhere else?
MilaM
My thought as well. I can only see one tweet, no replies. I'm guessing it's a thread, and you need to have an account to read the replies?
Fnoord
Replace x.com or twitter.com with nitter.net ie.
[1] https://nitter.net/alexellisuk/status/1707296079849365650
geerlingguy
I've posted separately some test data: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/21
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A NVMe compatible M.2 M Key connector (like the Rock 5 Model B [0] has) would have been really nice. I'm starting to accumulate old but good, yet small in storage space terms NVMe's which I'm no longer needing, but which would be perfect for a Raspi. Even if the PCIe bus were an older generation and not as performant as the NVMe.
The microSD card slot is really great to have, to get up-and-running, but once it's clear which function the board will serve, being able to move over to a directly connected old NVMe would really be a benefit, also in terms of reliability. These microSD cards scare me, yet I make full use of them.
Finally having a battery backed RTC on it is really great news.
[0] https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/hardware/5b