Announced early this morning, the Raspberry Pi 5 will hit streets in a matter of weeks.
Raspberry Pi 4 was good – very good!
The Raspberry Pi 4 has been around since 2019. When launched it was quite a power house for the price. It’s still available and continues to make sense for many people as their main home computer. It is more than capable of running the tasks performed by the average family. It sports a 1.5GHz quad-core processor, dual 4K HDMI ports, fast USB-3 connections, gigabit Ethernet, dual-band wifi, the ubiquitous 40-pin GPIO header and a stereo sound card. Prices start at £35 for the 1Gb model, though this and the 2Gb model are only really of use to those running applications from the Linux command line – not really for average family. However, the 4GB model comes in at just £55 and will happily run the Raspberry Pi OS with the Microsoft Windows-like graphical user interface and multi-task applications with relative ease.
Raspberry Pi 5 – a major step forward
Today sees the announcement of the new Raspberry Pi 5. So what have they done to the awesome Raspberry Pi 4 to move it forward?
Well, first up is an increase in the speed of the processor – to 2.4GHz. The Raspberry Pi organisation reckons that this equates to a two-to-three times increase in performance. There’s full 4Kp60 available on both HDMI ports, PCI-E connectivity, twice as much bandwidth for the USB ports, double-speed micro-SD card performance, an extra camera port, a power button (at last), a real-time clock (backup battery optional), a dedicated connector for a fan (leaving the GPIO free for whatever you want to use it for), a UART connector allowing you to control your Pi heedlessly, and mounting holes for fans.
What’s missing? The sound card output. There’s a 3.5mm jack to connect speakers and/or microphones to your device. But many phones have been lacking these for a few years now and most audio devices are USB based these days, so it will be a loss to some, but most will not miss it. And don’t forget – if you need 3.5mm connectivity, the Raspberry Pi 4 continues to be available and very capable.
Better = much more expensive?
So what’s the damage? Well a small increase from £55 to £59 for the 4GB model, with the 8GB model remaining the same price. As always, the Raspberry Pi organisation have striven to keep the Raspberry Pi as powerful and cost-effective as it has always been.
With all this extra power, there will be a new 5A power supply available. In addition, an impressive heat-sink and fan, new case that incorporates new passive and active cooling, and the previously mentioned back battery for the real-time clock will also be released.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is available for pre-order from all good suppliers now with deliveries expected to start towards the end of October.
And don’t forget that if you don’t need all this power, but do require a capable Linux computer for less demanding tasks, earlier models of the Raspberry Pi are all still available to purchase.
See the Raspberry Pi 5 at our Lancashire Day technoJAM
Every Lancashire Day, or thereabouts, we run a Lancashire Day technoJAM at Ormskirk Library. We showcase exactly what we get up to at our meetings and show you some of the exciting projects we’ve been working on. One of our main exhibits this year will be a Raspberry Pi 5 that can encode messages and send them to other people around the world without using the Internet – it’ll decode the messages it receives too.
Come along to our Lancashire Day technoJAM and see the Raspberry Pi 5 in action.
In summary – any good?
What do I think? It’s been a while coming, but it seems to be an impressive update for little more money than its predecessor. Mine’s on back-order already.
Further Raspberry Pi 5 details
Further details of the Raspberry Pi 5 can be found on the Raspberry Pi website.