Another Pi on the horizon! New additions include a PCIe 2.0 x1 lane (needs a breakout board) and connectors for RTC and a power button. I’m sure we will see many videos playing around with these features and more before the general public gets there hands on one. I hope they do a Pi 500 system in a keyboard with all of the breakouts.
Initial impressions seem to be positive on the changes, but people (rightfully so) aren’t crazy about the form factor and the low voltage/high amperage power delivery. It should be interesting to see what people are able to squeeze out of it in the coming months.
What its cool, but its just I am already expecting more gouging, so its unobtainable for the most part. They never fixed supply on 4 so probably wont fix it on the 5. On the plus side maybe 4s will be available now.
Its just hard to get excited for products from them as they prioritize business. I have been waiting for a pi 4 at MSRP for some time now.
On one hand it is a solid upgrade over the Pi4 and the price is reasonable.
On the other hand I do not feel they reach far enough, still a quad core, still “only” 8GB, still only 1 PCIe lane (2.0 is a solid upgrade). I also would like to see an on board 64GB flash storage or even a 2230 m.2 slot directly on the board.
As it stands now, while it is a good upgrade I see no reason to go for the Pi5 over the Pi4, the two are basically interchangable. Will be up to price and availability I guess!
Somehow it seems that the Raspberry Pi has sort of lost it’s way in trying to become a desktop replacement. While I don’t begrudge people who want a model to do that, the power requirements keep going up and up, the heat generated and the effective price does too.
What makes a Pi 5 worth paying more than a basic intel laptop would cost once you factor in a screen, keyboard, batteries, power supply, storage and a case?
I used to love seeing what I could do with limited hardware and the models that could run on 1A of power were excellent for projects that needed to run off batteries. If I need the kind of power (and heat) of the Pi 5, why not get a cheap laptop or Nuc and get full Intel compatibility while I’m at it?
ohh, the new pi, listed as 5V/5A, but 27W, will probably complain about low voltage, if it does not get like 5.1 / 5.2v. is a little annoying with the Pi4
Yeah it looks like a normal incremental step and nothing super crazy and interesting. Yeah $60 is a pretty decent price if you can get it, $80 makes it way less attractive.
From my knowledge most of these boards will lock you into some Chinese patched OS kernel. With the exception of the Pi and maybe some Pine (rockpro64 with tow-boot) stuff you can’t just boot an installer and next->next->finish.
I usually end up thinking about purchasing the PI for acting as video player for Kodi that I can plug into a TV or small projector. However, I find that it is 1 video decoding support out of date. They finally list HEVC decoding in the specs, which I wanted for the PI 4. Now they finally have it and I’m now looking for AV1 decoding support because I want to convert my videos to AV1 using the £136 intel Arc A380
It seems to always be better value/effort to just buy a second-hand NUC Off of ebay. I know it uses slightly more power, but it will always “just work” without issue. It ended up being cheaper than the PI4 at the time of buying it (when you factor in having to buy the case, power supply, and SD card on top)
I’m sure that thing wont be able to play high resolution AV1 videos either, but I reckon in a year one will be able to buy a second hand nuc or similar computer that will be able to. In the meantime, setting up Jellyfin client/server with transcoding is probably a better solution.
Max RAM Limitation
As others pointed out, the max being only 8GB is a dampener too. If it could at least get to 16GB, then I could see it acting as something more worthwhile to invest the time/money in as a low power home ARM server which is definitely worth looking into as ARM servers are becoming more commonplace, e.g. AWS t4 instances and Hetzner RX.
I just saw this particular model recently and it seems pretty capable for an x86 SBC (can run Skyrim 900p60hz) and do decent retro emulation for up to Wii and PS2 :
No WiFi or PCIe though. No price in the video as well.
The comments section also mention N200 and N300 variants as well?
Both Amlogic and Rockchip SoCs have supported HEVC (H265) for years, RK3588 supports AV1 and so does a bunch of Amlogic SoCs.
Edit: From what I recall CoreELEC is your best choice for “bleeding edge” Amlogic even if mainline Linux is catching up. Not sure what best supports RK3588 as time of writing.
