> It also supports USB-C Power Delivery, so finding a power supply that’s capable of supplying all that juice to the Pi 5 is a lot easier
Isn't this mostly false? The Pi4 uses 15W at 5V3A. The standard says, to exceed 15W you should increase the voltage, but Pi5 increased the amperage instead. 5V5A USB-PD supplies are almost unheard of.
I wonder how much a 9V3A -> 5V5A buck converter dongle would cost.
From my anecdotal evidence, I've found so far only the Radxa 30W adapter can negotiate 5v5a, most others only go up to 3A, and a few rare ones to 4a, but none I can find in the US.
Even if the power adapter supplies it, without a high quality cable there's enough voltage drop to trigger the low voltage warning.
I recommend the official supply or eventually the official new PoE+ HAT for now.
Probably about the same as the official supply, you'll probably start seeing them pop up. The current price I can see for the 5V5A supply is £11.90.
They go into the trade-off in one of the launch videos. Apparently if you've only got a 3A supply then the downstream USB power gets limited but otherwise it works.
> USB-PD R3.1 supports three charging models:
> - Fixed voltage
> - Programmable power supply (PPS), and
> - Adjustable voltage supply (AVS).
> In the fixed voltage scheme, the Standard Power Range (SPR) mode supports 3A and 5A at 5V, 9V, 15V, and 20V.
That’s about as clear as it can be, assuming AnandTech is correct.
Also keep in mind the existence of PPS as another data point. I have an Anker charger sitting in front of me that offers 3.3V-11V at 5A. 5V at 5A falls squarely in that range, as long as you have an e-marked cable that can support 5A. (I have no idea if the Pi 5 supports negotiating PPS, but it would increase compatibility with chargers if it does.)
I agree the Pi 5 should have included a buck converter or something, but I don’t think it’s correct to say they’re not standards compliant. It’s just not a common use of the standard.
In fact, using Wikipedia’s sources, I found the actual specs and here is another piece of supporting evidence for these other articles:
> The Fixed PDOs Maximum Current field Shall advertise at least 3A, but May advertise up to RoundUp (PDP/Voltage) to the nearest
10mA. Requires a 5A cable if over 3A is advertised.[0]
This is a footnote attached to 5V3A, indicating to me that chargers are allowed to offer more than 3A at 5V.
At a minimum, the spec seems to be ambiguously written, but I’ve only spent a few minutes skimming it. Multiple industry sources (previously linked) believe that 5V@5A is within the spec, even without using PPS.
You're both correct, but USB Power Delivery, like so many things USB, is a total mess with different revisions, and versions of those revisions, that each extend and deprecate parts of the previous revision. I'm going to ignore the actual protocol used for negotiation here, but there have also been at least three different protocols.
The first revision, rev 1.0, had six fixed power profiles: 5V/2A, 12V/1.5A, 12V/3.0A, 12V/5.0A, 20V/3.0A and 20V/5.0A. These were deprecated by rev 2.0, version 1.2, which instead introduced power rules at four fixed voltages, supporting power supplies with different output powers. The maximum supported currents by the specification were 5V/3A, 9V/3A, 15V/3A and 20V/5A. These power rules were retroactively named the Standard Power Range (SPR) in rev 3.1. That revision also added the Extended Power Range (EPR), which raised all the current limits up to 5A, but only when used with electronically marked cables. EPR also added power rules at 28V, 36V and 48V, again requiring (differently) marked cables and up to 5A. So 5V/5A is a valid option, but only when used with a USB PD rev 3.1 compatible power supply and cable.
Orthogonally to the fixed power rules, rev 3.0 introduced the Programmable Power Supply, which allows a configurable voltage between 3.3V and 21V in steps of 20 mV. This was extended by rev 3.1 with voltages between 15V and 48V in steps of 100 mV, called the Adjustable Voltage Supply. As far as I'm aware this is not commonly used, and most products advertising Power Delivery support use the predefined power rules.
What good is a universal port if it's not actually universal? I would actually prefer different shapes, because then you could be pretty confident that if everything fit it was going to work. Like how USB used to be.
Having a plug on say a laptop that can be a charger, a HID, a drive, a monitor, or all of the above with a docking station is vastly superior to the old day IMHO.
Unfortunately the cable to do that isn't cheap and is massively overkill for say a phone charger. Thus cable compatibility becomes a thing but looking at HDMI cable compatibility is always a thing.
I think the problem is what used to be complaints about niche connectors are complaints about USB-C and it feels different and more impactful even if it isn't necessarily.
After all I know back in the Mini-USB days you had manufacturers skipping the data pins to save some copper leading to frustration when you couldn't transfer files.
It is really worse. I have ton of USB-C cables doesn’t transfer data from flash lights, a lot of USB 2.0 speed cables with USB-C connector, then USB 3.0 cables rated at 5G/10Gbps without an easy way to know the difference, then Thunderbolt 3 / 4 cables one each.
Besides Thunderbolt cables, there is not a standard nor universal way to identity them. I had to test each cable by plug in an SSD then speed test the SSD.
Flash back 15 years, a cable with MicroUSB either transfer data, or not. The difference between high speed / super speed only lives in the device.
Don't forget to mention displays in this discussion.
A USB-C docking station will plug into many of my laptops, but only two will display anything on the screen.
Being able to pick and choose features like that is not user friendly. It will do everything except when they didn't feel like implementing it is not a good standard.
Having to buy yet another adapter cable to make things work wasn't great. Nor was having to use a hub because FireWire and Thunderbolt at up space that could have been USB cables.
At least you get minimal functionality (why are you hoarding data less cables?) Better than having to go buy one because you have a billion micro USB but no FireWire to hook up that drive.
> I would actually prefer different shapes, because then you could be pretty confident that if everything fit it was going to work.
The baseline profiles for power delivery (i.e. anything up to 20V@5A) have been all but done for two, three years now - you can readily buy combinations of PD and MUX chipsets that handle everything you can throw at them, and Anker has high-quality chargers to supply the juice.
The thing where USB-C still has issues is alternate modes. USBx usually works on all ports of a laptop or PC and virtually all cables, but anything involving TB, display, debug or audio is a hit-and-miss given how incredibly difficult it is to route all these high-frequency signals and properly mux them.
Usbc is the greatest thing to happen to humanity the last 20 years.
The simple fact that we can finally share charging cables across phones is a god send, not having a single cable for all phones was the stupidest thing people had ever done.
Micro-USB was previously the phone charging standard for everyone but iPhones for a good ten year run (and even then EU sold iPhones shipped with a micro-USB to lightning converter in the box).
It’s such a mess that the EU took one look at it and said “let’s make that a universal standard and force it upon everyone!” Modern USB truly is the government bureaucracy of standards.
EU has been trying to work with Apple on this almost since the lighting cable was released.
I believe there were discussions about potentially standardizing on Lighting if Apple relinquished it's tight control over the technology but they were not interested in that path.
The EU decided that Apple cannot dictate what cables are used to charge their phones to the degree of at one point charging manufacturers $4 per cable (to be fair it seems like Apple was providing the hardware so it wasn't a pure licensing charge).
Huh? I didn't say anything about Apple. The parent post didn't say say anything about Apple. The grandparent didn't say anything about Apple. The great grandparent didn't say anything about Apple. The world doesn't revolve around Apple. My criticism of the EU policy has nothing to do with the port on an iPhone.
If you're curious, my main objection to the EU is that I don't think USB-C is a good standard and I don't like the prospect of the whole industry stuck with USB-C longer than appropriate because there's no incentive to experiment and possibly come up with something dramatically better.
The standard of evolving standard. Those looking take note, don’t rush to standardize something when the tech itself is still being tweaked and iterated on. Let it iterate, document it, but don’t put standards in place when you clearly can’t track or regulate it. You just look like that boomer who just now got their Windows 10 Upgrade CD to work.
The reality is that with variable and programmable power supplies, it’s now up to the device to draw power at a balanced rate from the supply, instead of the “supply” pushing power in. Modern tech has allowed us to have supplies between 3V-48V, 500ma to 10A. All with a usbc head.
Yeah, ultimately if you want to run a Pi you ought to be buying an approved power supply. Trying to use random USB chargers even with a Pi 4 is a road to unhappiness. It doesn't have a battery, after all.
The Pi 5 does not require not require more than 5V@3A, except if you plan on pulling significant current from its the USB ports. If you don't get the 5V@5A supply USB ports get limited to 600mA each and you're still good.
At least better than the Pi3-, which could end up drawing up to 15W on a connector that officially only supports up to 2.5W, therefore resulting in lots and lots of bricked SD cards...
I feel like they probably should diversify their offer and make both cheaper and more expensive models. Many people here including myself probably would love to have an even more powerful and less cheap model (e.g. I consider Raspberry Pi being a common standard extensible compact computer it's key selling point, don't care much about the price but often find myself handicapped by its CPU and IO performance while we all know similar type SoCs can do much do much better as many smartphones do), at the same time for many users and use cases it indeed probably should stay cheaper than it is becoming. Perhaps selling premium beefy models could have helped sponsoring cheaper ones.
They do have the zero, but it hasn't been updated in awhile and I wish it was. There are still tons of projects with benefit from these cheap microboards, even smaller than the pi. The Pis have become pretty powerful but also more expensive. It would be nice to have, like you're suggesting, a trade-off and it have a clearly good platform to use
Pi Zero: Nov 2015 (1x ARM1176JZF-S @ 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM)
Pi Zero 1.3: May 2016 (now you can use cameras)
Pi Zero W: Feb 2017 (Wifi and bluetooth 4.1)
Pi Zero WH: Jan 2018 (omg, soldering the gpio pins? Much wow)
Pi Zero 2 W: Oct 2021 (4x ARM Cortex-A53 @ 1Ghz, still 512 MB, now bluetooth 4.2)
I'm not at all convinced they are caring about this market. Realistically there have only been 3 models and there really hasn't been much push into this area. The Zero 2 upgrade wasn't anywhere near the leap that the normal pis are making. I know there is more limitations, but they also have more competitors and it isn't like the zeros are sitting on shelves. There's till a good market for <$20 computers (and especially for a $5 one)
Factor in a proper PSU, storage, case and cooling, amd64 boxes are cheaper than Pis now. Going to replace a pi 3 server with one of those, not having to deal with ARM is a huge plus.
^ This. I moved away from my Pi years ago to an old 2nd hand Mac mini I got cheap online.
Dealing with ARM has a huge pain for many things I did. Especially back then when docker and arm support was pretty limited.
But there were other times where ARM were an issue too. I just don't want to (and sometimes can't) compile things.
It's hard to go wrong with the Optiplex i5-6500 boxes that seem to have flooded the market recently. Amazon has them for $100 with 16GB RAM and a 256 SATA SSD. They have a NVME slot and PCIx16. They seem to be cheap, because that chip won't technically support Windows 11.
The nonstandard, low wattage power supplies combined with lack of room for full size dual slot (single PCIe x16 slot) cards limits the utility of these boxes :{
Sure, you can't fit a huge graphics card in there (power or space), but I'd argue that if running a full size graphics card and/or multiple 3.5" drives is your goal, a SFF isn't the right case. Pretty sure you can find an equivalent full-tower machine as well, though you do have the Dell proprietary PSU.
I had mine running for a bit with long SATA cables snaked out of the case to a couple 3.5 drives in a makeshift enclosure, but SATA/NVMe drives have gotten so cheap, it calls into question the need for all the power.
For most people with self-hosting tasks amd64 is back as the way to go.
As you say, there are a ton of "minipcs" on the market that directly compete with the Raspberry Pi on cost and power usage. They're typically slightly larger but the expansion options (bring your own RAM/storage) plus real I/O (with real PCIe), disk, etc IMO significantly outweighs this. They're also typically more performant and while aarch64 platform support is increasing dramatically there are still the occasions where there's a project, docker container, etc that doesn't support it.
Taking it a step further, there are a TON of decommissioned/recycled corporate/enterprise SFF desktops on the market. They don't compete in terms of size (13" x 15" or so) but they can actually get close in power usage. Many of them have multiple SATA ports, real NVMe, multiple real half-height PCIe slots, significantly better USB and PCIe bandwidth, etc.
With my project Willow and Willow Inference Server[0] we're trying to drive this approach in the self-hosting community with an initial emphasis on Home Assistant. They're generally sick of Raspberry PI supply shortages, very limited performance, poor I/O, flaky SD cards, etc. The Raspberry Pi is still pretty popular for "my first Home Assistant" but generally once people get bitten by the self-hosting bug they end up looking more like homelab very quickly.
For Willow particularly we emphasize use of GPUs because a voice assistant can't be waiting > 10 seconds to do speech recognition and speech synthesis. There are approaches out there trying to kind of get something working using Whisper tiny but in our ample internal testing and community feedback we feel that Whisper small is the bare minimum for voice assistant tasks, with many users going all out and using Whisper large-v2 at beam size 5. With GPU it's still so fast it doesn't really matter.
The Raspberry Pi is especially poorly suited for this use case (and even amd64). We have some benchmarks here[1]. TLDR a ~seven year old Tesla P4 (single slot, slot power only, half-height, used for $70) does speech recognition 87x faster, with the multiple increasing for more complex models and longer speech segments. A 3.8 second voice command takes 586ms on the Tesla P4 and 51 seconds on the Raspberry Pi 4. Even with the Pi 5 being twice as fast that's still 25 seconds, which is completely unusable. Not fair to compare GPU to Raspberry Pi but consider the economics and practicality...
You can get an SFF desktop and Tesla P4 from eBay for $200 shipped to your door. It will idle (with GPU and models loaded) at ~30 watts. The CPU, RAM, disk (NVMe), I/O, etc will walk all over a Raspberry Pi anything. Add the GPU and obviously it's not even close - you end up with a machine that can easily do 10x-100x what a Raspberry Pi can do for 2x the cost and power usage. You can even throw a 2.5gb Ethernet card in another slot for $20 and replace your router if you want to go really dense.
Even factoring in power usage (10-15w vs 30, 2-3x) the cost difference comes down to nearly nothing and for many users this configuration is essentially future-proof to anything they may want to do for many years (my system with everything running maxes out around 50% of one core). Many also gradually grew their self-hosted situation over the years with people ending up with three or more Raspberry Pis for different tasks (PiHole, Home Assistant, Plex, etc). At this point the SFF configuration starts to pull far head in every way including power usage.
Users were initially very skeptical to GPU use, likely from taking their experience in the desktop market and assuming things like "300 watt power usage with a huge > $500 card". Now they love having a GPU around for Willow and miscellaneous other CUDA tasks like encoding/decoding/transcoding with Plex/Jellyfin, accelerated Frigate, and all kinds of other applications. Willow Inference Server (depending on configuration) uses somewhere between 1-4GB of VRAM so with an 8GB VRAM card that leaves for plenty of additional tasks. We even have users who started with the Tesla P4 and then got the LLM bug and figured out how to get an RTX 3090 working with their setup which also of course leads to absurd performance with Willow - my local RTX 3090 goes from end of speech to command completion in HA to TTS feedback in ~250ms. It's "speak, blink, done" fast.
The lack of GPIOs problem in Mini PCs could be solved with a cheap external USB->GPIO adapter such as this one: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/
The above board was intended neither for the Raspberries nor for Mini PCs, but the code is Open Source and shouldn't be too hard to adapt.
In the Home Assistant community most GPIO and other duties have migrated to ESP devices and the excellent esphome[0]. I have at least 10 devices around my home and it's fantastic, I haven't wired up GPIO to a Pi or anything other than a $5 ESP8266/ESP32 for years.
Another instance of using the right tool for the job.
Yes, that would likely be an even better and cheaper solution if one doesn't need to drive GPIOs from a complex OS such as Linux which would require a fatter board than an ESP one.
Any leads on the ESP32-S3-BOX-3 SKU (the replacement for the ESP32-S3-BOX that Willow was developed for, IIUC)? I saw someplace say the only place to get it is Espressif's Aliexpress page for it, but they show out of stock for me.
The initial release of the BOX-3 was essentially a pre-production run with ESP-BOX similar 3D printed plastics.
The full production run of the BOX-3 from Espressif with proper injection molded plastics should become available from a retailer/distributor near you within the next couple of weeks.
The issue (among others) is we achieve the speech recognition performance we do largely thanks to ctranslate2[0]. They've gone on the record saying that they essentially have no interest in ROCm[1].
Of course with open source anything is possible but we see this as being one of several fundamental issues in supporting AMD GPGPU hardware.
The Federal minimum wage has not changed since 2009, but the CPI captures effects like per-state minimums increasing, less people working minimum wage jobs, etc. No "adjust for inflation" calculation will capture the "pain" that every individual experiences from making a purchase, but this index is pretty close.
Depends what you need. You can still buy the old ones, and they are cheaper than at launch. But now have the option to buy a more capable one, for more money. If you're in the market for a v4 then they're getting cheaper.
I very much suspect they will be releasing 1GB or 2GB models later after the initial demand for it has died down and they can keep boards on shelves. Notice the the 1/2/4/8GB indicator on the board itself (and how they didn't say there won't be those models)
given their computation power now, how many people do you think would benefit from that offering vs older pis sold at a discount?
the main point for the price was to make it more accessible for kids, so that parents can buy one without thinking too much about the costs. the 1/2 GB may not support the desktop use cases that might be expected from the performance of the new pi.
i think the pi zero is now their main go-to device for the price-consious audience at this rate.
The pi zero _2_ still is on 0.5GB of ram. 2GB would be a big step up from that. Use cases like running home assistant or unify network controller don't work below 1G, and would benefit from faster cpu and storage of the Pi 5
I think the implication is the scalpers who are sitting on Pi 4s they've been trying to sell on Amazon for $100 will quickly dump that inventory (and try and snap Pi 5s, no doubt).
Pi4 is still a great piece of kit, it's only 8W (the 5 is 12W), and you're not going to be as worried with cooling. There are a ton of projects out there for which the 4 is a good choice.
For a general purpose computer though, the 5 is getting to the point where it is competitive for a lot of use cases where the 4 was a bit of a struggle. It sounds like I could definitely consider using a 5 as a mini-workstation for web browsing, some light dev work and the like, in those cases where the 4 felt a little clunky.
Looks promising, but it's also a pretty different machine - I like the Pi Zero because it's cheap and just capable enough (basically I want a full OS, but I would never consider using a Zero as a desktop). The Radxa-s look quite a bit more powerful, but they're also twice the price, and once you're spending that much, the possible gotchas with software support make it a lot less enticing to me.
it does seem like there is an in between that might be nice. specifically something at the roughly 4 gigs RAM but 5 watts, lower clocks and worse graphics. I think that's just about the right specs for a machine to run Linux without a fan and provide a good entry level experience (i.e. can do some real work in a terminal and watch video in a browser)
I enjoy using the R.Pi 4 and R.Pi 400 and from the start I've been a supporter of this class of relatively inexpensive Linux-first device.
But the R.Pi 4x series is peak R.Pi for me. In the last couple of years, NUC-class SFF devices with Intel-based chipsets have appeared [1] and they offer a much better performance profile (speed, power consumption) than the R.Pi 5. Some of these devices offer dual gigabit Ethernet.
[1] Liliputing is one site that I follow for related information.
The Orange Pi 5 series offers similar in a relatively small board factor too, though, as well as stuff like HDMI video capture, built-in or modular eMMC, Rockchip's new(-ish) NPU, dual 2.5Gbps Ethernet, and M.2 support. It's a big reason why the RPi5 kind of falls flat for me: it's a worse one of those, and not really much cheaper.
I have a few NUC-style very small form factor Intel machines around too, of course, but there are a lot of good options out there and ARM shouldn't be discounted.
For most of my use cases (3d printer controller), I don't really need any of those. So easily 2x the price for something I won't use isn't worth it.
Not that I don't have an Orange Pi 5 for other uses, but that's gathering dust in a drawer because I'm waiting for good GPU drivers. The Raspberry Pi 5 seems like it'll have Vulkan 1.2 out of the box. I'm still waiting for Panfrost's new PanCSF drivers for the RK3588 Malis.
I have a Klipper-driven print farm. For a 3D printer controller, you do not need a Raspberry Pi 5. Or a Raspberry Pi 4. You can use a $30 Le Potato and be fine with it.
I did have a disconnect issue with CAN bus on a Pi 3 though. Swapping out the Pi 3 for a Pi 4 fixed it using the same install/SD card. I even swapped back to test and it disconnected an hour into a print again. But CAN is a whole different beast that I'm not sure I'd recommend.
A 30$ Le Potato is still more than the 25$ Raspberry Pi 3A+. Which I like for it's smaller size. A single USB port isn't too big a deal if you get a CSI Pi Camera for monitoring instead of USB, or use the GPIO for serial.
I can't find an OPi 5 for less than $100, nearly double the price of the low spec Pi 5, and other good boards like the Rock 5 B start in the $130s.
I would love to see an RK3588S board for < $50, because the chip is incredible in terms of efficiency and feature set... but it's just so expensive still.
Do you have a good sense of what boards are worth looking at for media center use cases? In the last few years it's become the norm to need to be able to drive a 4k display with HDR metadata, and decode 4k HEVC with HDR in hardware (and ideally pass through Dolby Vision as well). The dream is to be able to do that with a relatively inexpensive board with just the mainline kernel.
I've had bad luck with the Pi 4 with respect to video decoding. 4k HEVC decoding is an advertised feature of the Pi 4, but it chokes on anything with moderate bitrates in my experience. I'd like my next board to support HDR and HEVC so reliably that I never have to think about it, and I'm not sure if that's going to be the Pi 5 or not.
My contention is for things that actually need relatively-modern performance (taking into account that the RK3588 is still a little old, albeit Very Fresh for a SBC), I think that $20 is probably worth it for most of them.
Orange Pi is a great platform & I have one, but now the SBC price is hovering around $100 or more and so a the reused 1L business mini-pc makes even more sense, if it's computing you're after.
Price-competitive NUCs are generally very old Celerons (J4105 and similar), which are CPU-competitive with the RK3588S but generally a little slower. Those NUCs also generally have glacially slow GPUs and poor hardware acceleration for stuff like video. And a lot of the mainboards of that era can't go over 4GB of RAM, whereas you can get 16GB in an Orange Pi 5; I've got three of those in my home k8s cluster alongside some older amd64 PCs.
The new Intel Alder Lake N N100 up to i3-N300s are just starting to appear. Most are semi pricey but we are seeing some sub $150 offerings, new. The top end N300's are easily equivalent performance of an 35w i5-8600t. With some nice extra modern features/bells/whistles. https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/02/zx05-mini-pc-stick-p...
The real challenge is though that for most people, there's a huge market of secondary/resold business mini-pcs. These systems offer exceptional value. They're bulkier & idle close to 10w often, but if you're not doing battery powered or mobile robotics it's almost always a great trade-off.
My old Acer Chromebox units were even smaller and idled around 4w, and had two pretty beefy cores (alebit with low clock and small caches) and gobs of io. 6 USB3 ports, which it could easily saturate & barely break a sweat. Internal sata and mini-pcie wifi. Incredibly great value, and I was picking them up for under $100 years ago. Stuck 2*16gb ram in em. Amazing value.
If you need gpio, there are really really cheap USB based addon peripherals that offer whatever you might want and more.
It bothers me a lot how many people seem to support a market for junky piddling slow & limited celerons. The chips you cite have barely changed in almost a decade & were low end to start. I used a Chuwi 12.3 laptop with n3450 for a while & it was quite survivable sure. But there's so much more value going to resale markets or spending a little more & buying a Lenovo business 1L mini PC when it goes on sale. I wish Intel wasn't able to get away with selling such bad performance for so long.
Thankfully the new Alder Lake N replacement is worlds better. It's a great chip, and we can buy units at reasonable prices. I wish AMD competed here too but they have remained far up market.
Yeah I should have constrained it to new-stock stuff that isn't a repurpose of other hardware. You have absolutely been able to find stuff if you wanted to work for it. I don't really, so it's not on my radar.
Alder Lake stuff is showing up now, and that's pretty great. It is not, however, particularly fast hardware, and the GPUs are still really pokey.
I got a couple of Lenovo i5s with 8Gb for 99 Euros each on Amazon a few months ago. They even came with a 500Gb SSD and Windows 8 installed (or was it Windows 7? I can't remember, they are running Ubuntu at the moment). They are much better than a Pi and cheaper given the sourcing dificulties.
Yeah, as soon as I heard about the 5 needing cooling for most tasks I went ahead and got a 8GB Pi 4. That will be powerful enough for what I'm going to use it for, I have plenty of "real" computers for beefier projects.
> Yeah, as soon as I heard about the 5 needing cooling for most tasks I went ahead and got a 8GB Pi 4.
You heard wrong, then.
"For normal usage of your Raspberry Pi, adding cooling is entirely optional. The idle performance of a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Raspberry Pi 5 is about the same, and under typical loads Raspberry Pi 5 will run cooler than a similarly loaded Raspberry Pi 4."
"even when fully throttled, a Raspberry Pi 5 is still going to run faster than a Raspberry Pi 4!"
A Pi 5 has a higher performance ceiling than the Pi 4 when passively cooled, and an even higher one with active cooling. The Pi 5 does not need cooling for most tasks.
> Yeah, as soon as I heard about the 5 needing cooling for most tasks (...)
I'm sure those who put a premium on thermals or quietness will be able to run RPi5 with passive cooling if they really want to. The RPi4 already suffered from thermal issues and that didn't pose a major problem. Anyone could simply drop by Amazon and pick one of the many passive cooling cases without any issue.
I'm hoping Flirc updates their passive heatsink case for Pi 5. It's my favorite case for the Pi, and it should be able to handle the 5's slightly increased temps.
What do you mean? I run a lot of things in ARM64 boards, and the Pi has an almost insane amount of software support compared to most alternatives (I'm running an unofficial port of Proxmox on my 8GB Pi 4...)
For pure-software projects, where you could just throw an x86 thin client at it for cheaper anyway, yeah the pi4→pi5 upgrade path is quite straightforward.
But for anything involving raw GPIO, you know, the reason you might want a true embedded board instead of a commodity PC, the pi5 has completely changed the architecture. The GPIO pins used to come straight off the BCM CPU with direct register access, now they're peripherals of the RP1 southbridge IC which is connected over PCIe.
Chief in my mind is the rpitx/pifm projects, which (ab)use the DMA pipeline to cram baseband-rate samples into the PWM registers and make a GPIO pin oscillate at radio frequencies. Connect a (bandpass filter, please! and a) piece of wire, and voila, the board becomes a radio transmitter.
This simply won't work on the pi5 without a complete rewrite of the core. Someone will have to figure out if the RP1 even offers similar capability, figure out if PCIe packet jitter will screw it up or if there's some buffering possible in the RP1, and rearchitect the whole project around it.
However, neither of those projects has seen much activity lately. In other words, it ain't likely to happen. Just keep using 3's and 4's for this.
For some stuff, pifmrds for instance, stereo processing really chews through CPU, and precludes running a station-automation package on the same iron. It would be really nice to have a faster CPU wrapped around the same transmit capability, but that's not what the pi5 is. If someone builds a station-in-a-box around this, it'll have a pi5 for the front-end but a pi4 as the actual exciter.
Are people really looking to RPi for performance though? Surely the appeal is that it’s good enough, open enough and has a bunch of peripherals and stuff you can tinker with. Or maybe I’m out of touch (obligatory: no it’s the kids… etc)
I am in that group now. Basically, my hobby development has moved to Raspi machines. I use a 400 as my primary station and various 3 and 4 models to do projects with.
One very nice thing is to package everything up with a Pi and have that project be self-contained. Dev tools, I/O whatever all nice and compact.
Start another project? Just setup another Pi and go.
Having a higher performance model means moving more of what I do onto a Pi. Things like VS Code run reasonably, but not great. On the 4, many things are close to great.
The 5 appears capable enough to change that equation.
Fair play then. I genuinely thought it was just a little dev/experiment/prototype platform for people, as it was for me. If this is what you need then god speed!
What I have seen happen is people basically get going on Raspian and start to like it. Myself, I have used UNIX flavors since SGI IRIX and I find Raspian simple, well supported and easy to use.
A fast Pi, plus a solid load of OSS packs quite a punch!
Dev tools for many languages.
Open, Libre Office and friends suddenly makes for a very cheap, effective desktop one can use to get a whole lot done.
Anyone inclined to work with OSS can grab one of these little Pi computers can do a lot. I use them that way frequently.
Even compared to a SFF PC, a Pi takes up basically no space and works great with a passive cooler. And you can run it from a battery pack and thus develop on it using your tablet while at your favourite Starbucks.
8 second boot times? That's only 2 seconds slower than my Commodore 64. </snark>
On the less snarky side... I'm sure it's a better system, but just because a core can run at 2.4GHz instead of 1.8Ghz, you have to take power dissipation into account. You have the same problem with overclocking: you can up the clock speed, but there's still only so much thermal energy you can remove from the packaging before you have to throttle the core to avoid melting the solder off the board or delaminating the PCB underneath the package. I'm sure the good people at Broadcom have taken this into account, I'm just commenting you can't just say "oh. it has a 33% faster clock, it's going to chunk 33% more data."
I think someone demonstrated in the announcement thread that, adjusting for inflation, the Pi5 is going to be cheaper at release than the Pi4.
Ultimately though, at least IMO, the Pi isn't about being cheap, it's about being capable while staying a great value. I bet there's a lot of hidden complexity in the pricing, and it's very possible that they'd have to compromise significantly more than 12.5% of the functionality/performance to get a 12.5% price reduction (to $35).
Pi 5 is really nice but it requires a heat sink... this makes it ... whole different game to me...
I think as long as there are both 4 and 5, it is good, otherwise this is fantastic they are experimenting as they should, but there is value in being low-power and versatile in my view.
It does not. They’ve made a point of noting that it’s faster that a Pi 4 even if you run it without a heat sink and let it throttle the cpu back when it hits the temperature limit.
When it's fully throttling the clock rate to limit temperature, it's still faster than a Pi 4 is capable of being. It's inaccurate to characterize that as a "crawl to a stop."
Any idea if the cooling solution mentioned, either as heatsink or fan or both, significantly impacts the footprint of the unit? In terms of weight and also dimensions. Can you reasonably cool the unit under load with a fan that is almost not noticeable when it's attached to the board?
Really cool stuff in any case, glad to see this product continuing to get new features and spec bumps.
They've shown off fan modules that fit underneath the usual 'pi hat' size, so it seems the answer is: no in terms of size. You'd still need cutouts for ventilation though.
Not sure about the 5, but I have a heatsink and fan on my 4 and while it was designed to fit inside the official pi case (there is no evidence of active cooling from the outside), it is very noticeable in terms of sound.
I know it may sound silly but the need for active cooling is a deal breaker to me. I’m still hoping to see some massive heat sink or a metal case that acts as a heat sink.
But the overall Pi evolution leads towards hotter, louder and more expensive, which there are better options where you get more flops per buck.
It's not a need, per-se. running a small service on it that only uses 10-20% CPU and just bursts now and then, I don't see it throttling. It's only running benchmarks or activity that uses one or two cores 100% all the time that runs into throttling (and even throttled, performance is a good deal better than Pi 4 unthrottled).
I have to think most Pi’s in the wild are sitting idle most of the time. How many people are using them in compute-intensive projects? I certainly don’t need more CPU to run a pihole or a rain gauge or whatever.
Mostly agreed, but "sitting idle most of the time" isn't quite the right metric. The question is if it can handle the peak loads. And a pi zero can run pihole and a rain gauge.
I don't plan to upgrade my rpi4 running homeassistant, a Plex video streaming server, a tailscale VPN exit node, and a few other minor services.
Plex on the rpi4 can't keep up transcoding 4k video to 1080p, maybe the rpi5 can, but I don't personally need that. Many Plex users do need 4k transcoding though.
Also, I have tried to use the pi4 as a desktop replacement, and I just found it too slow for the modern bloated world of webapps. All the little things just added up to too much and I gave up. The pi5 might be good enough though, but with all the peripherals and pains of arm64, a used old laptop is still probably better on the price/performance ratio.
Being idle most of the time doesn't mean you don't need compute, there's a lot of use cases (usually-low-traffic web servers, for example) where you're idle most of the time but when something actually happens, you want to handle it quickly.
I use a Raspberry Pi 4 to host a Nextcloud instance. It's sitting idle most of the time, but the weak CPU of the Pi 4 (combined with a fast connection and the fact that Nextcloud is a terrible pile of slow PHP) means that syncing lots of small files is actually CPU limited.
(Seriously, I set it up on the Pi 4 thinking that Nextcloud would be mostly IO limited. I wasn't considering the fact that its file syncing is based on WebDAV, and every single WebDAV operation is a separate HTTP request which goes to a freshly spun up PHP interpreter which has to go through all the work of connecting to databases and handle authentication and what not in order to write a 100 byte file to disk. Still, it works well enough for the small size and quiet of the Pi 4 is worth the trade-off.)
I've got a zero 2 sat next to me that's got uncomfortably warm because I've been pushing too much at it.
What I've been trying to do is get it to chew through whisper.cpp at anything like a reasonable rate. It can so nearly do it with the right sized model, the latency isn't good enough yet, but the reason I'm doing this on a pi zero 2 is because of the USB-OTG port. I can take the whisper.cpp output, and have the pi pretend to be a USB keyboard, typing what it hears into a second machine over USB. This gives you dictation capabilities in environments where upgrading the PC it's plugged into isn't an option.
Like I say, it's not quite there yet in terms of usability, but it's close enough that I think the problem is just a matter of software (and arguably model) optimisation.
Those require a bit more power than a Pi Zero though. That's not necessarily a blocker but if the system OP is talking about only has USB2 ports a Pi 4/5 wouldn't be suitable.
I think it’s great to have more cpu. My kids built a Minecraft server on a 4S and it doesn’t perform that well.
The small form factor is really convenient for turning on and off.
Pis are designed for the edge case and that allows them to sit in drawers. If you design for the median only, then you’ll never get to median because people won’t be able to run and test the edge cases.
I run BIND, Apache, sendmail, SearXNG, npf, and route a class C network over tinc on my 8 gig Raspberry Pi 4 with software mirrored disks. I just bought an Orange Pi 5 because it's much faster (it has four Cortex-A76 cores, just like the Raspberry Pi 5 and at the same clock, too, but it also has four Cortex-A55 cores, which are by themselves about the same performance as the Cortex-A72 in the Raspberry Pi 4).
Moving to the Raspberry Pi 5 just isn't an option, because I'm already memory limited at 8 gigs, so 4 gigs would be unusable.
I bought my Orange Pi 5 with 16 gigs, so I'm quite looking forward to doing the upgrade! Granted, there might not be too many other people putting this much work on Pis, but when you're power constrained, they're an excellent option.
For my DCSkyCam project, htop shows 1.8 load average on my Pi 4B. It's always busy, with resources left to handle spikes based on what the camera detects (or post to mastodon/website). I'd say it's right-sized. Best part - not throttled, even without a case, fans, or even heatsinks. That probably wouldn't be the case with a Pi 5.
I have been using RPIs for multimedia art projects where I am running heavy audio and/or video processing, sometimes maxing out all available cores. So I am pretty excited about the new specs :)
If you're going to mess with capitalization for the title, it would be better ending with "than two Pi 4s" for pluralization -- there is no "Pi 4S" model.
> Missing opportunity to release 16GB version (...)
This seems to defeat the whole purpose of a Raspberry Pi: cheap, almost disposable computer to tinker around with.
A 8GB RPi4 board is already more expensive than some used desktop computers, and until recently some major hardware manufacturers (ahem apple) were still selling high-end laptops with less than 16GB of RAM.
I understand asking for features such as PoE and SATA support, but 16GB of RAM feels like an attempt to make the RPi something that's not supposed to be.
What do you need 16GB for that doesn't need a beefier CPU to match?
I've been running multiple 2GB Pi's and I can't think of any reason why I'd ever need more than 4GB. If I need that also want more IO (PCIe/NVME) and more CPU to make use of it.
AI models are a pain to getting running nearly as good on smaller amounts of RAM (if you can get them running at all) even though the compute itself plenty usable for many. If your use case is always going to be a home dns server or using a few GPIO pins then it doesn't really matter.
On the Pi 4, the BCM2711 supposedly supports 16 GiB (35-bit address space, with top half for peripherals and bottom half for SDRAM)[0 pg 5]. However, there seems to be some firmware limitation that limits you to 8 GiB of RAM, even if a 16 GiB chip is installed.[1] I would assume the BCM2712 would have the same address space (or bigger), and, as such, could support 16 GiB (or more) of RAM, but the firmware is written with the assumption that only 8 GiB of RAM will be installed.
The Pi firmware comes as a binary blob, but has there been any effort to reverse engineer it?
The 'S' in the title should be lowercase, it's "two Pi 4s". The current title makes it sound like there's a model called "Raspberry Pi 4S" and the Pi 5 is better than two of those Pi 4S models.
Yes also the only reason it is capitalized in the original headline is that the headline is presented in all caps. In the article itself they say “Pi 4s”.
I've built desktops in the past before, its more about disinterest in doing it at all for anything
the services that will do it move the pricing of raspberry pi's to an equally as unattractive territory. might as well just get an old android phone and turn it into a server at that point.
I am all thumbs when it comes to hardware, and Raspberry Pi is about as easy to put together as imaginable. I purchased my Pis in "kits" provided by resellers, and assembling the kits takes about 15 seconds.
Isn't this mostly false? The Pi4 uses 15W at 5V3A. The standard says, to exceed 15W you should increase the voltage, but Pi5 increased the amperage instead. 5V5A USB-PD supplies are almost unheard of.
I wonder how much a 9V3A -> 5V5A buck converter dongle would cost.