I'll never understand putting half the ports on one side of the board and half the ports on another. There is no neat way of running a Pi either headless or plugged into a display and keyboard/mouse that doesn't involve an absolute clusterf** of cables going every which way on your desk.
I get that the board is small, but, put the most commonly used ports on one edge, and extra/accessory ports on another. Power, network, two USB, and one display on one edge, that's all I want, so I can neatly tuck this into a shelf or rack, or at the very least orient the thing on my workbench so all of the cables are coming out one way. It's not like I can put my Pi 5 in a Pi 3 case, so what's the path dependency on footprint and layout? This form factor frankly sucks, and I can't see a good reason why they've stuck with it other than "that's the way the B has always been laid out".
A raspberry pi has literally more ports than your average laptop, in a much much smaller PCB footprint.
Of course the port layout is going to be a fiasco. It's just not physically possible any other way, unless you start shoving everything into a single USB-C port and force the user into using adapters and docks, at which point you'd just be removing actual ports like laptop makers have been doing for the past years.
I never asked for more or different ports. I asked for a more reasonable layout that doesn't result in a cable squid on my desk to hook it up to power, keyboard/mouse, and display.
Obviously port layout is harder than just "just move it" but aside from the physical board foot print, mounting hole locations, and GPIO, there doesn't seem to be some holy thou-shalt-not directive that ports can be moved around, considering the USB and Ethernet ports have flip flopped a few times, the ports change shape, get removed, etc. So, move the most commonly used ports next to the required ones, and put them all on one side of the board so this can actually be neatly slotted underneath a monitor or on a shelf or rack mounted without having to buy a bunch of right angle adapters, PoE hats and switches, or a $50 Argon One that moves the power and display ports to a more convenient location on the back of the Pi by means of a PCB.
A partially facile suggestion, but it sounds like what you want is the Pi 400's board design; unfortunately there's no Pi 500, yet!
The current form-factor is based on the B+ (the B had ports on every single side, if you count the GPIO pins, while the B+ moved the power round to the same side as the HDMI), and I suspect part of the reason for sticking with the form factor is the HAT specification (which specifies physical layout as well as electrical and software requirements), which I think was published at the same time as the B+ was released (my memory's fuzzy on that point, though).
it's a little pricy but the Argon One case will fix your gripe. Probably others too. I agree that it'd be nice if it were laid out better on the board, though!
Not to undermine your concerns, but in case you are curious the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) is lovely and allows you to choose from a wide variety of carrier boards which might better fit your use case. I use them in my robots but I have a few carrier boards for home that make them like a regular Pi for random stuff around the house.
Everything else looks great but those filthy nasty micro HDMIs need to go away. Why do those still exist? It's like still using MicroUSB.
I guess it must have something to do with legacy digital signage or something but still. Full size HDMI is fine because it's what everyone already has cables for, anything small could just be USB-C.
Couldn't they have even just gone with a single USB-C and done the dual monitors with an adapter? Seems like that kind of thing exists on Windows.
The problem with putting USB-C video on there is that USB-C is DisplayPort, and there's a good chance for various reasons (last time it was said that at least historically, the Raspberry Pi is a cut down version of a Broadcom chip that was used in a set top box or media player or something) the SoC only has an HDMI interface block on it and not a DisplayPort one. Thus, supporting this would require the addition of at least a converter chip, plus a Type-C port chip, which probably takes up valuable BOM budget. Given how few ICs are present on this board, this was probably not a feature very high on the priorities list.
The microSD slot is one of my favorite features on the Pi. It's so easy to manage configurations, you can write the system to a new card, swap, and even nontechnical people can swap back if needed, and it's all cheap.
If it were up to me, Android phones might be doing the same thing, SD as primary storage, with an OS that was optimized for write cycle preservation. It's just so convenient, simple, and obvious.
I don't want the Pi to try to replace desktops, because it's not going to. I've already got a laptop, I don't need any more bandwidth.
I would prefer it if they added a small capacitor that could carry the SD card though it's internal FTL business on sudden power loss, that could ensure the SD always has power until at least a few ms after the last access. But I'm not sure if that's actually the problem. I just use a script to reduce disk writes(Mounting tmpfses, etc).
Are you running Home Assistant or a DVR or both? Or something with Chromium as digital signage, without putting all it's profile folder crap in RAM?
I've never had a reliability issue with SD cards, I've even seen other people set up stuff on no name cards that run for years, but I keep seeing posts about them on HA boards.
Plus now there are industrial-ish microSD cards for similar or less cost than other kinds of storage.
If you treat it as read-only, then yes, sd-cards work fine.
But setting that up can be a hassle depending on the project, and completely out of character for what the raspberry is.
But that is what I do, because you can't use the Pi reliably if you don't (or if you fiddle with external storage). And that is a serious limitation and something that the majority of Pi users don't. And thus endless suffering. It is not in the same ballpark as "easy to manage configuration".
And many applications require that you write to storage at least some of the time. Such as HA. And in turn you must use external storage.
Why is the micro sd a problem? It was there on the early pi (as a normal sized SD slot) since it was cheap, easy to implement and widely available. And the chips could not boot off usb so there was that. These days I guess it is mostly for legacy purposes and the pi can boot of usb anyway if you don't want to bother with it.
MicroSD is a pain but it very easy to switch to much faster(OR SLOWER) USB flash drives. eMMC programming would be an unnecessary pain for the non Compute Module users.
USB Flash Drives can suck, just like there are good SDcards.
>And high-quality ones are almost always bulky.
Yeah, but have you ever run a Pi off a good SSD over USB3? Very nice.
And eMMC can be bulky too, I'm so scared to dremel this plexi so that the case doesn't crush this IC, marked by blue: https://imgur.com/VQNV7Bp
Relatedly wouldn't it suck for the RPi5 to introduce another breaking design to the case ecosystem for the minority group that is already served by the Compute Module?
In any situation where I would want to use a Pi with a display instead off SSH into it, I'd always prefer the option of having the ability to run two screens over one. The mini HDMI port is only an annoyance if you buy one, but had an old one with a regular HDMI port and realize you needed to buy a couple extra things once.
Its not like a a USB-C only Macbook where you might actually be bringing it to various different locations and unexpectedly need to do a presentation.
What is the imagined use case where you have a Pi in your bag (for some reason), the USB-C power plug that rated to run it, a mouse and keyboard, an Ethernet cable, want to display the Pi, refuse to SSH into it, and didn't bring one of the two cables you have to output the display? Maybe a found Pi sensor in a war zone that has been logging environmental data? I'm struggling for another scenario.
Idk why people are down voting you just because they disagree with you.
To the downvoters: disagreeing with someone is not a reason for a downvote. Belligerent comments or false information are. OP was merely expressing an opinion.
Looks like a few places are blowing embargoes (or at least the release time wasn't well coordinated). From the original Farnell email links, products aren't available to purchase yet (the links go to the RPi4 landing page).
> The Raspberry Pi 5 also features a single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface for improved connectivity
This is something that's very interesting to me... from the photos of the board it looks like the PCIe port is being exposed over the same kind of ribbon cable socket as the camera. The PCIe port is one of the best parts of the CM4, so it's great to see this as part of the vanilla RPi (assuming this is all legit).
Can't help but I feel slightly disappointed. This is essentially a weaker version of RK3588 based SBCs, but lacks both smaller cores as well as NPU. And those boards are available with 16GB of memory. And we're talking about a very old core at this point, A76 really isn't new (~5 years old core).
That isn't to said it's useless, the Ampere Altra is using basically the same arch as this one and it's perfectly usable. But if I wanted a small machine, an Alder Lake-N is a lot faster and at the same price - and runs perfectly with upstream Linux. I feel like the only nice selling point is now the formfactor and hopeful future "neat-little-addons" to this one.
RK3588 can't use upstream and I assume this one will not either for now (Phoronix left that out of their article - curious). I would hope this gets better support than the RK3588, but when? And since this is actively cooled in any case, the ADL-N looks far more interesting as cheap computing/server solution.
Yeah, IMO this is kind of... boring? I mean, the PCI thing is nice, the performance is a nice bump, maybe they'll improve availability, but this seems like it's really just a Pi 4.1; I had hoped the Pi 5 would be RISC-V. Or at least UEFI[0], although I can't find confirmation at all about the firmware status so fingers crossed.
[0] Edit: Yes I know there are UEFI builds for Pis 3 and 4, but since there's no onboard memory to hold it you have to chain load it from an SD which undermines the usefulness of the thing IMO.
Finally! The Cortex-A76 is ARMv8.2 at least, so it has a non-LL/SC atomics model (Large System Extensions). You'd normally have to call out to libatomics for outlined implementations that could choose the right instructions at runtime, but with this there might be hope to finally assume armv8.2 as a rough minimum...
Benchmarks are nothing groundbreaking but wins are consistent and in some cases pretty big (2x throughput/50% of the rpi4 wall clock time, etc.) Nice fan header. I'll take it!
It's the top link in the XML Sitemap that is linked from robots.txt. This is how Search Engines generally find new content on large sites, rather than by crawling.
Seems like the TDP of these Raspberry Pis are really going up this time... On the Pi 4, it was possible to get it to pull over ten watts by overclocking it, and it had a bunch of hacky cooling solutions. It's good to know that the new version of it has a proper 4-pin fan header that doesn't take up GPIOs now, and the official looking fan/heat sink combination actually looks fairly nice and low profile this time around, and no longer relies on double sided tape to hold a heat sink onto the chip.
The Orange Pi 5/5Plus use rk3588 cpu, which is big.little, and the 4 A76 cores are about 3x faster than the 4 A55 cores. So `sysbench --threads=4 cpu run` gives 10030.46 events/s, `sysbench --threads=8 cpu run` only increases it to 13578.29.
Which is to say the extra 4 cores are nice, and probably help keep power consumption down, but they are very slow compared to the performance cores.
The Orange Pi 5 / 5Plus boards have far far more features than the RP5 and to me are far more interesting. They have PCIE!
Most importantly though, you can just buy them. I ordered 8 Orange Pi 5Plus 16GB boards from aliexpress and got them in about 2 weeks. You could buy 50 today if you wanted. Good luck getting 3 RP5's, much less 8.
They (Phoronix) are benchmarking the RP5 against an Orange Pi 5. There is also an Orange Pi 5 Plus, which adds a ton of stuff. If you don't need the Raspberry Pi specifically for some reason, the Orange Pi Plus is faster and has way more features, and to me is very interesting for a lot of use cases. Plus you can buy them without fighting with scalpers or being limited to buying 1.
What software are you concerned about? I'm running Debian and I can apt-install anything in the arm repositories, which is basically everything. Neither the RP5 nor the rk3588 used on the Orange Pi have everything supported in mainline kernels, but in a year or so both probably will.
OS support, yes; the ARM ecosystem is overall a trash fire in terms of being able to use mainline Linux. Even Pis don't actually have a good track record with actual mainline Linux, but they're popular enough that their downstream patches are actually maintained so you can keep using current kernels; most boards get whatever buggy kernel the vendor drops when it ships and then nothing. Now AIUI Orange Pis do actually have a decent track record for upstream kernel support? So that might be fine in this case, but I deeply sympathize with people not wanting to figure it out and just going with the name brand that they know will get supported.
I have one orange pi board where I messed a bit with the OS/kernel. I think the kernel patches where copy of a competitor similar board with the same SoC (if I remember correctly a friendlyelec board) where the fact that it was copy pasting showed in places where they forgot to replace the name of the board...
I'm hopeful the effort to get the rk3588 fully supported in the kernel will be successful. I think you can already get it working with a vanilla kernel but you lose hdmi. Far from ideal but great progress so far.
I wish they had a slightly more competitive CPU. If these results are real, my 6+ year old phone has better scores than Rpi 5.
I have an RPi4, and there are a whole bunch of things I can't do with it because it's just too slow and inefficient. I get that being slow is fine for many tasks, but one can wish.
It quotes usb-c 5v@5A. I don't think I've ever seen a device that could provide 5V@5A over usb, is this a thing? It seems like this is going to really limit the flexibility of powering this.
Maybe the spec allows that pairing (5V@5A) to exist, but it's not implemented in any power supply! Total wattage is irrelevant if the RP5 only accepts 5V. Feel free to link to one if one exists. For sure virtually no PD power supplies support it.
From what I can tell this is a top of the line Anker GaN charger which can produce 140W. However, if you look in the manual: 5.0V 3.0A / 9.0V 3.0A / 15.0V 3.0A / 20.0V 5.0A / 28.0V 5.0A (140.0W Max)
The only power supply I have seen that can do this rediculous 5A at 5V is the one being released for the RP5, https://www.sparkfun.com/products/23584 You can see from the picture it actually outputs a nonstandard 5.1V@5A, suggesting that the voltage drop due to the cable actually causes problems powering the RP5 so they built a 'hot' power supply to try to correct for it. This seems like a pretty big design flaw, why not just design the RP5 so it can negotiate a higher voltage on PD? It looks like it has room for a couple mosfets to implement this.
Yes, but what technical aspect explains the difference, they’re both based on energy efficient arm technology. TDP for the cortex is lower I think? Is it the silicon size? Cortex is used in fanless phones.
The heat sink of a phone is the phone. Without a sink this thing has a tiny surface area. The heatink of a Mac is order of magnitude bigger as in: the laptop.
Price is a consequence, not a cause. If they make the price of the pi 50 times higher, it doesn't mean it no longer needs active cooling. I'm interested in knowing what the technical differences are that impact the cooling, and i understand these differences may come at different costs, and thus different prices. But seeing they're both low energy chips for mobile use cases, and both used for use cases where passive cooling is sufficient, i'm trying to understand why the pi needs active cooling.
Are they using eMMC? Or is it an unused feature most of the time?
I'm arguing why the mainstream option doesn't have the obscure technical feature. You what also sells like hotcakes? Raspberry Pi Compute Modules with eMMC.
Really Raspberry Pi people? I guess availability of cheap very useful boards like rpi zero 2w was a fluke and no one intends to come back to that. Now they're just focusing on designing expensive boards like every other commercial manufacturer. I could understand if they were struggling financially, but there have been tens of millions of £ of (UK) government and private donations to their "charity" precisely to keep low cost boards available at low cost to enable tinkering.
It blows my mind how shitty Raspberry PI foundation are to their community:
- They prioritized industry over community, and made it almost impossible for hobbyists to get any meaningful hardware for so long.
- They allowed retailers like Pimoroni price gouge Raspberry PI's by forcing everyone to buy really expensive bundles of needles cables, power adapters, officially licensed toothbrushes, and other nonsense
- And then, after all that drama, they release a new edition of the flagship product and make community members have buyers remorse over waiting so long and paying $400 for a Raspi Pi 4 2GB + officially licensed socks bundle. (The prices of Raspi Pi 4's in some countries was/is really shocking and sad.)
> It blows my mind how shitty Raspberry PI foundation are to their community:
You are conflating Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd and Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The foundation is hardware agnostic, and even create content for 3rd party micros such as the micro:bit [1].
> prioritized industry over community, and made it almost impossible for hobbyists to get any meaningful hardware for so long
The company went through an existential crisis during the silicon shortage / pandemic. They had to make very hard decisions. The "prioritized industry" was mostly constrained to older hardware w/ larger process node sizes (Raspberry Pi 3), and compute module.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37685580