If you have taken a look at what the Raspberry Pi 4 can offer, good news, its successor is arriving next month, and at prices that are still just as contained despite a nice upgrade.
After more than four years of good and loyal service, the Raspberry Pi 4, launched in June 2019, now has a descendant, logically called Raspberry Pi 5. With such a long time frame, the newcomer brings a serious boost in power and some trendy features. Portrait of this favorite device of many tinkerers.
An SoC engraved in 16 nanometers now
Last year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation marketed a new Pi Zero, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Now time for the renewal of the most iconic and popular model, with the Raspberry Pi 5.
The main glaring change relates directly to the processor. The Raspberry Pi 5 integrates a Broadcomm BCM2712 chip engraved in 16 nanometers by TSMC. This has 4 ARM Cortex A76 CPU cores. Each has 512 KB of L2 cache, and they share 2 MB of L3 cache. In terms of frequencies, the cores go up to 2.4 GHz.
For comparison, the previous model, the Raspberry Pi 4, uses a Broadcom BCM2711 SoC engraved in 28 nanometers, also with 4 CPU cores, but Cortex-A72. They share 1 MB of cache and cap at 1.8 GHz.
Not to spoil anything, the SoC is supported by 4 or 8 GB of LPDDR4X-4266, compared to the LPDDR4-2400 / LPDDR4-3200 previously. According to the foundation, this upgrade makes the Raspberry Pi 5 two to three times faster than the Raspberry Pi 4.
On the GPU side, we find a VideoCore VII graphics subsystem operating at a frequency of 800 MHz. Again, this is a notable improvement, since it was VideoCore VI at 500 MHz until now. The GPU supports Open GL ES3.1 and Vulkan 1.2. Additionally, the Raspberry Pi 5 is capable of controlling two 4K@60Hz displays and has hardware 4K@60 HEVC decoding capabilities.
Small concern about consumption and heating nevertheless, with an official 27 W power supply compared to 15.3 W for the 4, and also an active cooling system among the accessories…. in short, to see in practice.
Well-provided connectivity
Speaking of connectivity, the latest addition to the foundation features a pair of USB 3.0 ports as well as two USB 2.0 ports and a USB-C port which is used for power. It also offers two micro HDMI outputs.
The device offers a PCIe 2.0 x1 interface (requires a dedicated adapter such as M.2 HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) for M.2 devices) and supports up to 1.5 Gbps bandwidth bandwidth for MIPI transceivers (via 4 channels). Also note the presence of an SDR104 standard SD card reader.
There is also a GbE port. Finally, for wireless connectivity, we find Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fi 5.
What prices for the Raspberry Pi 5?
Despite all these improvements, the bill is not increasing excessively. The increase is 5 dollars compared to the Raspberry Pi 4. Thus, you will have to pay 60 dollars for the version with 4 GB of RAM and 80 dollars for the one with 8 GB, the only two available at release.
On this subject, contrary to what Christopher Barnatt claimed a few months ago, the Raspberry Pi 5 will be released in 2023: marketing is planned for October.
Source : raspberry
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