Welcome Raspberry Pi 5!

Surprise! The makers of everyones single board computer have done it again and boy this is a good one!

Under the hood we have a 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 Processor running at 2.4GHz, which when you compare it to the Raspberry Pi 4 makes the Pi 5 2-3 times faster.

We are also seeing a boost in graphics performance with the 800MHz VideoCore VII GPU, dual 4Kp60 display output over HDMI; and something I am most excited about. Improved camera support from a rearchitected Raspberry Pi Image Signal Processor.

We are also getting a new RP1 ‘southbridge’ which if I got this right is the 1st time a full sized Raspberry Pi will have build in-house silicon! In a nutshell we will see faster performance from USB, Camera interfaces *yes I meant the plural! Also doubled peak SD card performance and a single lane PCI express 2.0 Interface.

On the Pi 5 its even easier to see how much LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM you have, as its clearly indicated. As far as I gathered at launch only the 4GB and 8GB models are available.

Lets take a walk round some of features we can see on the board.

As someone that uses the Pi Camera a whole lot, this got me excited! Now there are 2, 4 lane MIPI camera/display transceivers which if the size of the connector looks familiar it should. These connectors use the same flex cable as the Pi zero! Having 2 camera connectors/interfaces is nothing new to the Raspberry Pi echo system. The dev board for the CM3 and CM4 both had 2 camera interfaces. This is a welcome addition to the consumer friendly full sized Raspberry Pi form factor (FSRPFF? Can we use this Acronym?). I am not 100% sure but I think we can connect the DSI screen using these connectors too?

The eagle eyed of you would have noticed a UART connector between the HDMI Ports. UART is not strictly new to the Pi either but this type of connector is, at least for the FSRPFF. We have already seen this on the Pico and yes that does mean you can use the RP2040 based debug device to connect to the Pi 5 (although personally I have not figured that out yet).

As we swing around there is an external battery connector for… REAL TIME CLOCK!!!! When I have seen a new pi come out thats like the 2nd or 3rd thing people ask for thats missing. Well its here! Real time clock people can rejoice!

Past the USB – C (still OTG compatible) power connector we see an innocuous hole in the board I have not figured out why thats there. But if you cast your gaze above it there is a Power button! So now you can power off your Pi gracefully!

We get Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi® and Bluetooth 5.0 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). In design is very similar to the Pi 4.

Another big change is the return of the Ethernet port on the left side of the board.

The PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for fast peripherals (requires separate M.2 HAT or other adapter) which I have not seen yet so I can’t say much more than that but honestly I am super excited to see what people will make out of that.

I am really just scratching the surface I will have missed loads but I wanted to share this amazing release with you all and give my quick 2 cents.

I have had a very short time to fuss with the Pi 5 and I got to say I am wonderfully impressed! The 2-3 times faster might not seem much on paper but when you have a Pi boot to desktop in 7 seconds, while you have docker running a bunch of containers in the background is impressive!

if you want to get a closer look at the Pi 5 , I’ll have mine on show at the Raspberry Jam Berlin event this weekend at motionlab.

Of course you can find more information here including the full list of specs: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/