Raspberry Pi5

The Raspberry Pi foundation announced the Raspberry Pi 5 on the 28th of September. The official announcement can be found HERE

 

It is approximately 2.5 times faster than the Pi4 for CPU workloads and GPU workloads vary between 2 and 4.5 times faster.

 

The Pi5 has an official heatsink/fan and a fan header. Some heat tests I saw showed that without the heatsink it would overheat and throttle itself within 30 seconds.

There was also a new case designed to fit the Pi5 and its heatsink.

 

Unfortunately I will have to wait for the other case manufacturers (like Flirc) to come up with new designs. I have also been in contact with BitScope who make the Edge Cluster 12 that I have two of, as it looks like they need to make some changes to cool the Pi5.

Key features:

• 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU
• VideoCore VII GPU, supporting OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.2
• Dual 4Kp60 HDMI® display output
• 4Kp60 HEVC decoder
• Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi®
• Bluetooth 5.0 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
• High-speed microSD card interface with SDR104 mode support
• 2 x USB 3.0 ports, supporting simultaneous 5Gbps operation
• 2 x USB 2.0 ports
• Gigabit Ethernet, with PoE+ support (requires separate PoE+ HAT, coming soon)
• 2 x 4-lane MIPI camera/display transceivers
• PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for fast peripherals
• Raspberry Pi standard 40-pin GPIO header
• Real-time clock
• Power button

Its finally got a real-time clock, a power button and PCIe. The battery and holder for the clock are optional extras.

It comes in 4GB and 8GB versions. There is a rumor they may offer a 16GB model later. Official pricing has increased and is $60 (USD) for the 4GB and $80 (USD) for the 8GB.

I would have liked 2.5G networking and more CPU cores are always welcome. Certainly an evolution from the Pi4 but only really catching up to the competition.

I saw a conspiracy theory on the Raspberry Pi forums that Ebon (Upton) was waiting for Christmas to release Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian 12 (aka Bookworm) at the same time as the Pi5. It seems that might not have been far off, apart from the timing.

 

Updates and Corrections

Flirc have updated their website showing a Pi5 case.

The Pi case has its own fan and doesn't have room for the official heatsink/fan. You would only need the official case or the heatsink/fan, not both.

The close-up photos of the Pi5 show resistor points for  memory sizes 1, 2, 4 and 8GB. There is nothing for 16GB without a board revision. It does however indicate they can produce 1 and 2GB variants.

Its hot

Marks Rpi Cluster is running down it current work. Temperatures jumped over 10 degrees in Sydney, Australia in the last two days. Yesterday the computer room (my loft) was 33 degrees C so I suspended all computation until around midnight when it dropped a bit. Its 27 degrees this morning (at 8AM). Last night I resumed running 2 tasks at a time to keep the Pis a bit cooler. I did another batch of 2 at a time this morning but at this rate its going to take a few days to clear the tasks on hand. They are some Universe@home BH Spin work on the pair of Pi3B+ and Einstein@home BRP4 work on the Pi4's. The weather is forecast to be hot for a week before returning to normal (low 20 degrees C).

I mentioned in my last post that Pi's 5 through 8 were close to reaching 1M credits for Einstein. They have all passed 1M credits, although Pi number 6 was about 10k credits behind the others so took longer to get there.

The 20 micro SD cards I ordered have arrived. I am using Sandisk High Endurance 32GB cards these days. Now all we need is a Raspberry Pi OS update.

I am trying to get another Pi4 2GB model. I can get 1, 4 and 8GB Pi4's but the 2GB version is still out of stock at my usual suppliers. The 1GB is too little memory and I don't want to pay extra for a larger memory size when it doesn't need it. I'll also need to order a case for it but I do have a smare (official) power supply.

3rd of September

Marks Rpi Cluster continues to run 24/7.

All the Pi4's are running Einstein@home BRP4 work. Einstein haven't had any outages since I set up Asteroids@home as a back-up project. They probably won't have any now for a while as I think they've addressed their reliability issues.


Pi3 added
I added a couple of Pi3's back to the cluster. Why a Pi3? Well apart from having a pile of them sitting around (I also have a Pi1 and a four Pi2's) and the relevant power adapters I decided I would run Universe@home. They are an astronomy project studying Black Holes. Unfortunately when asked to update their app to 64 bit, they refused as it would involve development effort so they only have a 32 bit BH spin app for the Raspberry Pi.

I started with a couple of Pi3 model B's and while checking what speed they were running at found they were doing 1.28GHz. I dug out a pair of Pi3 model B+ which were more recent (copyright 2017) and swapped the model B's out. The B+ will run at 1.4GHz if they don't get too hot. Both of the cases have fans. This might be a temporary arrangement, but we will see how they work out. Work units vary from 5 to 11 and a half hours to complete but only use 3MB of memory.


Another one reaches 1M
My 5th Pi4 to join Einstein@home has reached 1 million host credits with Pis 6, 7 and 8 also fairly close to a million. Overall the cluster is on 26.3M credits for Einstein@home.