Pi 5 announced

More technical details here:

So: Raspberry Pi 1 = first models of Raspberry Pi. RP1 = a chip on the Raspberry Pi 5 board.

I'm increasingly thinking that the Raspberry Pi people like being confusing.

Cool.

Only 4 Core Cortex A76 (no Cortex-A55 cores). I think the A76 is the fast core, so, I guess, mainly a loss of energy efficiency when idle(ish). Given the Orange Pi5 (with 4xA76 + 4xA55) is 1-2 watts at idle, there might be room to play with. i.e I'm disappointed it isn't 8 core, but it might be a good pragmatic choice.

I think, no storage apart from micro SD, no (SATA, NVME), but I quite like micro SD.

The big thing for me will be the GPU and driver, VideoCore VII GPU. In comparison, drivers for the Orange Pi5 GPU, the Mali 610, are problematic, stunning when they work, but due to GPU driver problems, my oPi5 is currently stuck on a 6-month-old version of Armbian, with updates turned off.

Am 28.09.23 um 09:53 schrieb Richard Kettlewell:

Look at cover plate above the cooler.

There never was a Raspberry Pi 1. The first iterations were Pi B and Pi A, followed by B+ and A+

I suspect area was a concern, and possibly the extra complexity of going big.LITTLE wasn't worth it.

There is NVMe via an additional HAT, TBA early 2024. Only PCIe Gen2 x1 though:

With more stuff moved to the I/O chip, I'm wondering how the CM5 will look: it would be nice to get access to more of that PCIe, but lack of USB 2 or ethernet without the I/O chip is going to be more problematic. Maybe they would hang the I/O chip off a x1 (fine for USB 2 and gigE) and allow access to the x4?

If they mainline their Mesa drivers (as the VC4 is) I expect the Videocore will be as easy to use as say an Intel integrated GPU (although perhaps not as featureful).

Mali started off with closed source drivers from Arm. The open source Panfrost project supports some Mali GPUs, but it seems not the G610:

Jeff Geerling video

That's interesting. Suggests the external PCIe lane is capable of Gen3 but only certified at Gen2 so far - it can be switched with some bootloader config.

That makes it interesting for external I/O - eg as a proper RAID NAS without having to go via USB.

Quite a lot of interesting new options that will no doubt be further developed in the fullness of time.

Theo

Thanks Richard. Looks pretty fun. Ideal client for graphical apps. My main criteria are HD video to a biggish display.

Otherwise the humblest PI with ethernet will do server side for my gas guzsling 'home server'

-- “It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since...it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.” Sir Roger Scruton

Excellent walk through.

recommended.

-- "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."

- Leo Tolstoy

Another review from elReg:

I've pre-ordered one, I live in hope.

I use Panfork, a fork of Panfrost, designed to work with Mali G610, but there appears to be some disharmony between the individual developer of Panfork and members of the Panfrost project. Which discourages optimism about the fork ever being merged back into Panfrost, and more fully supported. This is why I'm running a 6-month-old version of Armbian. I'm unclear if or how long it will take Panfrost to independently support the Mali G610. You'd think it was a priority, given the impressive nature of the RK3588(S) SOC.

As soon as they named the Raspberry Pi 2, those obviously became the Raspberry Pi 1. I don't care about official names, the point is that someone trying to search for info on the one is now likely to get false results applying to the other, especially for topics like electrical characteristics or register maps which apply to the new chip as well as the original boards. Not long ago I did a lot of such web searches for the Raspberry Pi 1 (because the info also relates to the RPi Zero).

I was probably being a bit grumpy pointing out just that, but it's such a simple, obvious, thing that adds one more trap the existing minefield of scattered RPi documentation.

Yesterday Youtube spilled a video from German magazine C't into my suggestins. They have tested the new Pi 5 and compared it's performance to Pi 4. Now I'm wondering wheterh there will be Pi 500 (Pi 5 based successor to Pi400, eventually with 8GB of RAM.

I wonder whether this time it will have an incredibly trivial but useful thing that is lacking from the present Pi 3 and 4: a power LED which

I imagine it is more obvious if you have a monitor connected by HDMI because there will be all the shutdown messages - but those are lost if you are viewing the screen by VNC once the TCP connection is dropped early in the shutdown process.

Yes, it *is* incredibly trivial ;-)

I hope also they've fixed the evil problem that the Pi 4 has (which the Pi 3 didn't) relating to a powered USB hub for driving a spinning HDD. I've tried two different hubs and found that the Pi hangs indefinitely during booting if the hub and the HDD are powered on at the same time as the Pi, rather than being powered on before the Pi is booted. The simultaneous power-on happens if there is a power cut and then the power comes back on. I found that as soon as the USB lead was unplugged or the hub was power-cycled after the Pi had hung, booting would continue.

Some people suggested that the problem was because the hub was sending power up the USB line to the Pi, so I made up a special cable in which I cut the +5V line between the Pi and the hub, but this made no difference.

If the HDD was powered from the Pi itself rather than from a powered USB hub, everything was fine, but this made the Pi run *very* hot, and there were warnings not to do it that way.

I eventually had to buy a powered HDD caddy that takes a SATA disk, rather than being able to use a USB HDD powered from a USB hub.

There is a multicolour LED and a power button, which cases can combine into a single illuminated button. It sounds like there's more PC-like power management, with poweroff, sleep, etc modes. It's handled by a new Renesas/Dialog PMIC which is apparently custom for the Pi and sounds like it has firmware to handle power management, current monitoring, USB-C power delivery, RTC, and maybe other stuff.

Not sure what's going on there, but I've had problems booting PCs with USB sticks plugged in via hubs (or USB-A to C dongles which contain a hub). I suspect some hubs stop the firmware talking to the USB boot device. Linux is full of support 'quirks' that particular devices have, but I suspect the firmware driver is more primitive.

Theo

NY,

I seem to remember some way to add a "power button" to the RPi.

With it came a small program (running below the OS) which controlled a relais which would than disconnect the power to the RPi. An ATX style powerbutton combo if you will.

You could try and see if you could only use the software part, and instead of driving a relais connecting to a simple LED.

... or make it a full ATX setup ofcourse. :-)

Regards, Rudy Wieser

You can attach a LED to any free GPIO pin and configure the kernel to use it as a "heartbeat"-LED - it will blink in heartbeat fashion, with the speed corresponding to CPU load. After shutdown, it will stop blinking.

All that is required on the software side is a bit of dtoverlay magic in /boot/config.txt - Look at the dtoverlay part in

Powering up again after shutdown is supposed to work by using pin 5 (GPIO2) for the button, but that interferes with I2C in my case.

cu Michael

They've moved the PoE takeoff pins. Guess that gives them a chance to make a PoE hat that actually works this time. Mutter mutter...