Thoughts?
PCI-Express! Cool
2.4Ghz Quad core! Cool
Active Cooler! Cool.
Liking the look of PCI-Express being available, but haven’t see any details on the adapter required yet?
Jeff Geerlings video gives a quick sneek peek at a prototype board
Curse Eben saying it wouldn’t be out until next year, that caught me off guard!
So overall a fairly chunky update, but nothing world-breaking. I’m interested to see what people do with the PCIE, I know it has been buggy in the past but now it’s an actual supported interface on the main product line surely it is going to get a lot of support. The RP1 potentially having PIO capabilities is fun too (according to Geerling).
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It looks like one major objective was to eliminate the speed bumps that the 4B had. Speed up the USB, Ethernet, WIFI, etc. The sore points that got complained about the most.
Not Bigger, but better, faster. =)
I’m thinking using as much of thier own inhouse silicon as possible, the SOC and RP1, will make production easier. Chip shortage wise etc.
Offering them to makers first and Industry second, won’t hurt us tinkerers either. ;)
Well, Ethernet and WiFi is the same as before. USB3 is faster in the sense that you can now copy from one USB3-device to another one with 5Gbps (which is not the everyday use-case for most of us). So it is mainly the CPU that gets a kick. And the typical H.264-video streamer might not even notice that, because the Pi4 had a hardware decoder and the Pi5 does this with the CPU.
Personally, I would have preferred that they had finally given up on the anachronistic layout with cables and connectors an all sides of the board creating a cable-chaos on the desktop. This is not a device for tinkering with electronics, so I just don’t understand why the stick to the 2012 design which was good at that time when the device was designed as an educational tool.
Yup, I reckon they’re slowly but surely positioning themelves to custom-design the CPU eventually. That’ll be very interesting.
Same hardware, but the low speeds on the Pi 4 were because the bus connecting it to the CPU was too slow. I think it was Jeff Geerling’s video which showed that they’re roughly twice as fast now that they’re going via the RP1, which is connected to the CPU via multiple lanes of PCIe.
Also no more through hole components so quicker to manufacture at the moment as no need for those complex robotic arms.
Yeah, pick and place SMT is faster and cheaper, as far as I know anyway.
You have to go through an additional soldering process for the through-hole, so it should be cheaper, and it seems like they don’t need the separate robotic assembly stage anymore either. Honestly, given the inflation that has happened over the last couple of years, a mere $5 increase in price is quite impressive.
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He does this claim for WiFi only and explicitly states that (on-board) Ethernet is identical. And as we all know, WiFi really depends on your environment. It is a shared medium and the WiFi of the Pi4 never was the bottleneck in practical terms.
In addition, put the active cooler on the device, and your rates will drop because the WiFi is right below the cooler.
His faster Ethernet-transfers are with a PCIe eth-card.
So all of this is WiFi/Eth speedup is very nice PoC-stuff, but nothing for everyday use-cases. The faster CPU speeds and a M.2 NVMe SSD in contrast will make a difference (e.g. rsync/scp on the Pi4 was limited by the CPU doing encryption). The M.2 SSD already works great with a suitable CM4 base-board btw.
The WIFI chip is under the cooler. The antenna isn’t though.
And it looks like a uFL SMT Antenna Connector for an external antenna could be added. If that tiny little square solder pad is what I think it is. You’d have to check to see if said mode will violate any laws etc for your country.
He does this claim for WiFi only and explicitly states that (on-board) Ethernet is identical. And as we all know, WiFi really depends on your environment. It is a shared medium and the WiFi of the Pi4 never was the bottleneck in practical terms.
Sure, the ethernet is the same, but the WiFi does seem to have had a boost. The fact that Jeff shows a 1.9-times increase in WiFi speeds on the 5 vs the 4 shows that something about the new layout is significantly improving throughput. Hackaday, who got a review unit, said that “The new WiFi controller in the SOC allows about twice as much throughput to the same radio.”. So the bus on the Pi 4 does seem to have been a limiter.
IMHO, it’s a nice step in the right direction. Especially for the modest increase in price.
And depending on what your doing, it could be a cumulative speed increase. =)
It is slightly annoying that we can’t alter pre-orders IN ANY WAY without losing the place in the queue and starting again, grrr.
The GPU is apparently a big (and perhaps over due) upgrade and has the pipe work to make it useful. Have mine on order :-)
Now the problem is that all the peripherals in my box of used parts no longer work. In particular, I have a MP2626 power booster but it only (!) delivers 3 amps. I am thinking I am going to need 6 amps before long and so, dear pimoroni, how long before I can order a lipo based power supply for my pi5? Oh and it has a usb powered speaker hanging off the usb port :-/ Can I stack (connect in parallel) two of the MP2636 modules perhaps?
You don’t want to wire up two “regulated” power supplies in parallel. They will fight each other if there is even slightest difference in output voltages. The one with the higher voltage will try to pull the voltage up, and the one with the lower voltage will try to pull it down. Both will get very hot, and bad things may happen.
The Pi 5 will run / work with 3A. It will run with the official Pi 4B power supply. It will however limit the USB ports max current to (I think) 600ma, if it can’t negotiate 5A wilh the USB C connected power supply.
I’ve modified these Adafruit 4A and 10A supplies with USB C cables to feed some of my power hungry Pi setups.
5V 4A (4000mA) switching power supply - UL Listed : ID 1466 : $14.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits
5V 10A switching power supply : ID 658 : $29.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits
I just cut the barrel jack off, and solder on my custom cable. Put some heat shrink on and job done.
There is a config.txt edit to get the full USB current, which is what I will have to do if I use one of the above custom wired supplies.