The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the imminent release of their Raspberry Pi 5B single board computer (SBC). Based on all the breathless reporting, the 5 is two to three times faster than the 4, while consuming half as much energy per equivalent processing load.

There are three main reasons why the 5 is so much faster:

• The chip architecture is a Cortex A-76 for the 5 vs Cortex A-72 for the 4,
• The process node is 16nm for the 5, while it’s 28mm for the 4,
• The CPU clock is 2.4 GHz for the 5, while it’s 1.5/1.8 GHz for the 4.

Other peripherals were also updated for the 5; the memory bus speed was also upgraded. Because of all the updates, upgrades, and new features, a new version of the Raspian OS will also be released to work with all the new hardware.

All of this will be released around 23 October 2023.

Am I impressed? In an abstract way, yes. These updates have been a long time coming, as the 4 was announced in 2019, or four years ago. The 5 is in no way a leader in this space. If anything the Raspberry Pi Foundation is playing catch up with the 5, allowing them come within shouting distance of all the other SBC competitors that have been introduced over the years. Its introductory prices are $60 for a 4 GB version, and $80 for an 8 GB version. This is just $5 more than the equivalent 4 memory models.

The bigger issue for many I’m sure will be the switch, yet again, of the USB and Ethernet port back to the positions they had with the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. So that means new cases yet again, and not reusing the older cases, as the Raspberry Pi 5 has changed and deleted some ports, and added some new physical features. There is no existing Raspberry Pi case that will properly fit the new Raspberry Pi 5.

Raspberry Pi Foundation has promised to only sell the new 5 to the experimenter and maker, not to small companies that might buy large quantities. That sounds nobel, but I’m still waiting for the 4 to show up where I trust to purchase electronics, such as Adafruit. A given model might show up on Adafruit for all of a day before they’re wiped out. For the most part Adafruit has been out of stock on all models of the Raspberry Pi since 2020. This now includes most models of the Raspberry Pi Pico, especially the WiFi version.

I am not waiting with anticipation for the 5. I learned the hard way with the initial 4 and the 4’s USB-C miss-wiring not to jump as soon as they become available. It took another release of the 4 to fix the USB-C power problem. Raspberry Pi Foundation promised that Lessons Were Learned and this new design has been heavily tested to avoid this problem. We’ll see.

The biggest issue is how Raspberry Pi the manufacturer has been unable to satisfy supply to the average person like me. Raspberry Pi made the promise that the lack of stock would ease, if not outright disappear, in August of this year. Here we are the end of September and as far as I can tell not much has changed for the better. It’s hit-or-miss with availability, and Amazon is still allowing price scalping on its site.

I have plenty of older stock of all types of devices, and if I need anything new I’ll more than likely use a much smaller and cheaper SBC using an ESP32, Arm Cortex M, or RISC-V SoC. They’re more than powerful enough for what I need and the language support is very broad. For the time being I’m content to sit back and watch the Raspberry Pi 5 show unfold.

Links

Raspberry Pi 5 Announcement — https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/