In another weekday piece from Maker Faire Rome 2023, ipXchange chats with Matt from Raspberry Pi about the new Raspberry Pi 5 Single-Board Computer (SBC). Frankly, these devices need no introduction, but there are some key features that set them apart from the previous generation, so let’s outline a few of them below. Fun fact: This board finally introduces a soft power-on button to the bare-board Raspberry Pis.
As Matt explains, the Raspberry Pi 5 boasts a 2-3x performance boost over the Raspberry Pi 4 thanks to a Broadcom BCM2712 quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor at the heart of the design, running at up to 2.4 GHz. An 800-MHz VideoCore VII GPU aims to make 4K video processing easy – this is currently being contested by members of the Raspberry Pi community – and two user-configurable 1.5 Gbps MIPI transceivers give designers the option of dual 4Kp60 HDMI display outputs, two camera interfaces, or one of each. As you can see, the Raspberry Pi 5 still sports some great wired connectivity options in the form of 2x USB 2.0 ports, 2x USB 3.0 ports, Gbit ethernet, and a new single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface for high-bandwidth peripherals, in addition to the standard 40-pin HAT header.
How does it manage these peripheral I/Os? Well, the Raspberry Pi 5 is the first Raspberry Pi SBC to introduce some in-house-developed silicon in the form of the RP1 chip. This I/O controller streamlines many of the interfaces – USB, ethernet, MIPI camera and display, GPIO – which, at a glance, doubles the USB bandwidth and microSD card peak performance while increasing bandwidth when using USB and ethernet peripherals together.
Out of the box, the Raspberry Pi 5 runs their Bookworm OS based on Debian Linux for immediate exploration of the board’s capabilities before developing your own systems. An M.2 interface facilitates boot from a solid-state drive for faster start-up and data transfer, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity means that standard wireless options are already available to support your project.
If you’ve got a commercial project, and the Raspberry Pi 5 looks like a great heart to your build, learn more by following the link to the board page, where you can also apply to evaluate this technology.
Keep designing!
You must be a member to leave a comment. Sign up or Sign in