Raspberry Pi 5 Officially Unveiled
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has officially unveiled the Raspberry Pi 5, which will be available to developers at the end of October. This new version marks a significant advancement with significantly improved performance compared to the previous generation. For the first time, the silicon chip is designed in-house by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in collaboration with Broadcom.
The Raspberry Pi 5 will be available in two variants, one with 4GB of RAM and the other with 8GB, priced at $60 and $80, respectively. This board offers processing speeds 2 to 3 times faster than its predecessor. It is equipped with a quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 processor clocked at 2.4 GHz, featuring 512KB of L2 cache per core and a shared 2MB L3 cache. The GPU, VideoCore VII, supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2 standards.
The Raspberry Pi 5 features a dual HDMI 4K output, a 4K HEVC decoder, a dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac interface, Bluetooth 5.0/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and a high-speed microSD card interface (with SDR104 support). It also includes two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet interface compatible with Power Over Ethernet (PoE) technology, two 4-lane Mipi camera/display transceivers, and a PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for high-speed peripherals. Additionally, it retains the 40-pin general-purpose connector common to all Raspberry Pi boards.
One of the most exciting additions to the Raspberry Pi 5’s feature set is the single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface. Intended to support fast peripherals, it is exposed on a 16-pin, 0.5mm pitch FPC connector on the left-hand side of the board.
Starting early in 2024, two mechanical adapter boards will be offered to convert this connector into a subset of the M.2 standard, allowing users to connect NVMe SSDs and other M.2-format accessories. The first board, following the standard HAT form factor, is intended for mounting larger devices. The second, sharing the L-shaped form factor of the new PoE+ HAT, supports mounting 2230- and 2242-format devices inside the Raspberry Pi 5 case.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is built on a new architecture that delegates the management of input/output functions to two separate chips, providing improved efficiency. The BCM2712 application processor is manufactured in 16nm, and the VideoCore VII GPU is equipped with open-source drivers developed by the Igalia company.
The Raspberry Pi 5 represents a significant leap in performance and features, offering an enhanced experience for developers and computer enthusiasts. With its affordable price and commitment to sustainability, it continues to play a crucial role in the single-board computer domain, opening up new possibilities for a multitude of applications worldwide.
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