Despite strong suggestions that a Pi 5 would be delayed until 2024, the Pi 5 has been announced and shipments are promised in the last week in October.

The new Pi 5 is simply faster. It is claimed to be 2 to 3 times faster than the Pi 4 and benchmarks by Phoronix back this up. Most of the speed increase comes from increasing the clock rate from a 1.8GHz to 2.4GHz,  but the upgrade to four A76 Cortx cores helps as does the new I/O chip designed by the same Raspberry Pi team that produced the Pico. The GPU has also had an upgrade and can now drive two 4K 60Hz monitors with hardware decoding. All this for just $5 more than the equivalent Pi 4.

The new RPI I/O chip should make USB faster and double the SD card reading speed.

The RP1 “southbridge” provides the bulk of the I/O capabilities for Raspberry Pi 5, and delivers a step change in peripheral performance and functionality. Aggregate USB bandwidth is more than doubled, yielding faster transfer speeds to external UAS drives and other high-speed peripherals; the dedicated two-lane 1Gbps MIPI camera and display interfaces present on earlier models have been replaced by a pair of four-lane 1.5Gbps MIPI transceivers, tripling total bandwidth, and supporting any combination of up to two cameras or displays; peak SD card performance is doubled, through support for the SDR104 high-speed mode; and for the first time the platform exposes a single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface, providing support for high-bandwidth peripherals.

Like the CM4 the Pi 5 offers a single lane PCI Express bus.

The full spec is:

• 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU
• VideoCore VII GPU, supporting OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.2
• Dual 4Kp60 HDMI® display output
• 4Kp60 HEVC decoder
• Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi®
• Bluetooth 5.0 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
• High-speed microSD card interface with SDR104 mode support
• 2 × USB 3.0 ports, supporting simultaneous 5Gbps operation
• 2 × USB 2.0 ports
• Gigabit Ethernet, with PoE+ support (requires separate PoE+ HAT, coming soon)
• 2 × 4-lane MIPI camera/display transceivers
• PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for fast peripherals
• Raspberry Pi standard 40-pin GPIO header
• Real-time clock
• Power button

The WiFi chip is the same as in the Pi 4 but its power managment and connection has been improved. The board has a slightly different layout and the composite video and audio are now only available via pads on the bottom of the board.

As well as the new Pi, there is also a new case, an active cooler, POE HAT and an M.2 HAT to support the PCI Express bus being used to connect M.2 devices such as SSDs.  No news on whether there will be a more standard PCI Express x1 connector.

Finally Pi OS has been upgraded for all Pi devices to a more recent Debian (Bookworm) and it uses Wayland on Pi 4 and Pi 5, which will be an ineresting change. The new OS should be available about the same time that the Pi 5 ships.

Finally no news on a P500 or a CM5 but it seems reasonable to expect both to be along at some point in the near future.

• Harry Fairhead is the author of several books on the Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Pico in an IOT context. He is already working on a new edition of Raspberry Pi IoT in C which will be published in December, 2023. But if you are new to the Rapsberry Pi family, prefer Linux as your operating system or want to use MicroPython then there are books already available to get you up to speed, see side bar. 

More Information

Introducing: Raspberry Pi 5!

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rpi5/raspberry-pi-5-product-brief.pdf

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