Raspberry Pi 5, All Improved, Available for Pre-Order Today – Ars Technica

Almost everything is on Raspberry Pi 5 4 is an improvement over the model, especially the way you buy it. In a first for a single-board company, the 5 is available for pre-order starting today Authorized resellers Usually available by the end of October.

Perhaps most importantly, 5 prioritize individual buyers over business partners.

“We are incredibly grateful to the community of makers and hackers who make up the Raspberry Pi; you have been extraordinarily patient throughout the supply chain issues that have made our work so challenging over the past two years,” writes the Raspberry Pi. Founder and CEO Eben Upton. “We want to thank you: we’re going to ringfence all Raspberry Pi 5s we sell until at least the end of the year for single-unit sales to individuals, so you get the first bite of the cherry.”

Print subscribers MagPi And Hackspace Magazines get “priority boarding” for Pi 5 purchases, including subscribers now. Raspberry Pi says it has set aside “a large stock” of 5 units for subscribers, sending them out to those with a code on launch.

The Pie 5 has a number of improvements beyond the basic AP and GPU, though they aren’t small jumps. The company claims its new 16-nanometer BCM2712, a 2.4 GHz quad-core 64-bit CPU, two to three times faster than the BCM2711 on the Pi 4. The new core — three generations beyond the Pi 4’s A72 — has a smaller processor and higher clock speed than the faster Pi 5, which consumes less power, Upton writes. The GPU is a Broadcom Videocore VII, capable of driving dual 4K/60 Hz HDMI displays, and comes with open source Mesa drivers.

Pi 5 also has a new chip to remove I/O functions from the AP. The RP1 handles two USB 3.0 and two 2.0 interfaces, a Gigabit Ethernet controller, camera and display interfaces, and GPIO, all connected to the AP via PCI Express. Many Pi users face frustrations with storage and data connections before reaching the limits of the board’s chips; This can open up the Pi 5 to more general-purpose computing and other interesting tasks than its predecessors. Since Pi spent $15 million developing the RP chip platform, it really should.

However, there is one significant change on the peripheral side: When using a regular 15-watt USB-C connector, the Pi 5 will reduce power output to 600 mA for USB devices under workloads below the 1.2-Amp limit. Pi 4. If you want to connect high-power drives, the $12 USB-C power adapter supports 25 W mode and should open things up a bit for overclockers.

Among other changes, the Pi 5 loses a composite video and analog audio jack, adding two FPC connectors, and moves the Ethernet jack back to the lower-right corner of the board. Pi also added two mounting holes for heat sinks on the board. There’s a new case that adds a low-noise fan, offers an optional active cooler for heavy workloads, and makes it possible to add a microSD card slot. That last bit will prevent a few first-time user disasters, we reckon.

Bag 5 is scheduled to ship by the end of October. Raspberry Pi OS arrives in mid-October and is the only first-party OS for the board.