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A Raspberry Pi 5 is better than two Pi 4S
- lagniappe 3y agoAs someone who thought they were getting away with something finding Pi4's in stock at a normal price... welllll shit.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoA Pi 4 is still a Pi 4, and who knows how long it will take for it to gain software support for whatever you are intending to use it for.
- rcarmo 3y agoWhat do you mean? I run a lot of things in ARM64 boards, and the Pi has an almost insane amount of software support compared to most alternatives (I'm running an unofficial port of Proxmox on my 8GB Pi 4...)
- myself248 3y agoFor pure-software projects, where you could just throw an x86 thin client at it for cheaper anyway, yeah the pi4→pi5 upgrade path is quite straightforward. But for anything involving raw GPIO, you know, the reason you might want a true embedded board instead of a commodity PC, the pi5 has completely changed the architecture. The GPIO pins used to come straight off the BCM CPU with direct register access, now they're peripherals of the RP1 southbridge IC which is connected over PCIe. Chief in my mind is the rpitx/pifm projects, which (ab)use the DMA pipeline to cram baseband-rate samples into the PWM registers and make a GPIO pin oscillate at radio frequencies. Connect a (bandpass filter, please! and a) piece of wire, and voila, the board becomes a radio transmitter. This simply won't work on the pi5 without a complete rewrite of the core. Someone will have to figure out if the RP1 even offers similar capability, figure out if PCIe packet jitter will screw it up or if there's some buffering possible in the RP1, and rearchitect the whole project around it. However, neither of those projects has seen much activity lately. In other words, it ain't likely to happen. Just keep using 3's and 4's for this. For some stuff, pifmrds for instance, stereo processing really chews through CPU, and precludes running a station-automation package on the same iron. It would be really nice to have a faster CPU wrapped around the same transmit capability, but that's not what the pi5 is. If someone builds a station-in-a-box around this, it'll have a pi5 for the front-end but a pi4 as the actual exciter.
- Semaphor 3y ago> I'm running an unofficial port of Proxmox on my 8GB Pi 4...) I’m doing the same with Proxmox Backup Server, Proxmox itself runs on a more powerful thin client ;)
- CyberDildonics 3y agoRasberry pi's are by far the best supported boards out there, what software support are you talking about that they don't have but will eventually?
- PaulRobinson 3y agoPi4 is still a great piece of kit, it's only 8W (the 5 is 12W), and you're not going to be as worried with cooling. There are a ton of projects out there for which the 4 is a good choice. For a general purpose computer though, the 5 is getting to the point where it is competitive for a lot of use cases where the 4 was a bit of a struggle. It sounds like I could definitely consider using a 5 as a mini-workstation for web browsing, some light dev work and the like, in those cases where the 4 felt a little clunky.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoI feel like the Zero 2 W is the new low-power option. Its 4 cores should be enough for most things, the 512MB RAM limit is a bit unfortunate though.
- rcarmo 3y agoGet a Radxa Zero, I've been using one with 4GB of RAM and 64GB EMMC: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/10/07/1830 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/10/07/1830
- dark-star 3y agoCool little device, but will it work with the RGB2HDMI, PiStorm or PiSCSI? I doubt it but if it were, that would be awesome
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoLooks interesting. Page doesn't say if drivers are mainlined?
- blacksmith_tb 3y agoLooks promising, but it's also a pretty different machine - I like the Pi Zero because it's cheap and just capable enough (basically I want a full OS, but I would never consider using a Zero as a desktop). The Radxa-s look quite a bit more powerful, but they're also twice the price, and once you're spending that much, the possible gotchas with software support make it a lot less enticing to me.
- kristopolous 3y agoI look forward to snatching up cheap pi 4s when this comes out
- paulcole 3y agoWho’s going to go to the trouble to untangle the bread board wires and drag them out of whatever dusty drawer they were forgotten in to sell them?
- stavros 3y agoPeople who like money.
- blacksmith_tb 3y agoI think the implication is the scalpers who are sitting on Pi 4s they've been trying to sell on Amazon for $100 will quickly dump that inventory (and try and snap Pi 5s, no doubt).
- kristopolous 3y agoI have pi4s I'm using that I'd love to swap out for something better. I'm sure many people feel the same
- fanf2 3y agoThey will still be selling new Raspberry Pies 4. https://rpilocator.com/?cat=PI4 https://rpilocator.com/?cat=PI4
- varispeed 3y agoMissing opportunity to release 16GB version or at very least give specs of the memory so someone could swap chips.
- zamadatix 3y agoThey didn't have the 8GB Pi 4 for the first year of launch either. I think it was Jeff G who said they were planning on a 16 GB release down the road.
- fanf2 3y agoYeah https://youtu.be/nBtOEmUqASQ https://youtu.be/nBtOEmUqASQ around 3:00 But in this interview https://youtu.be/vXYzJ1os4NA https://youtu.be/vXYzJ1os4NA at 11:50 Eben says that the chipset does not support 16 GB.
- bmicraft 3y agoMaybe it'll need a slightly upgraded broadcom soc like they did with the 8gb model of the Pi 4, or as a Pi 5+ variant
- euniceee3 3y agoAny ideas on what it would take to accomplish this? Like how would the extra memory be allocated without a firmware change?
- colejohnson66 3y agoOn the Pi 4, the BCM2711 supposedly supports 16 GiB (35-bit address space, with top half for peripherals and bottom half for SDRAM)[0 pg 5]. However, there seems to be some firmware limitation that limits you to 8 GiB of RAM, even if a 16 GiB chip is installed.[1] I would assume the BCM2712 would have the same address space (or bigger), and, as such, could support 16 GiB (or more) of RAM, but the firmware is written with the assumption that only 8 GiB of RAM will be installed. The Pi firmware comes as a binary blob, but has there been any effort to reverse engineer it? [0]: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/bcm2711/bcm2711-peripherals.pdf https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/bcm2711/bcm2711-periphera... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtym0TAWNto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtym0TAWNto
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoI have to think most Pi’s in the wild are sitting idle most of the time. How many people are using them in compute-intensive projects? I certainly don’t need more CPU to run a pihole or a rain gauge or whatever.
- prepend 3y agoI think it’s great to have more cpu. My kids built a Minecraft server on a 4S and it doesn’t perform that well. The small form factor is really convenient for turning on and off. Pis are designed for the edge case and that allows them to sit in drawers. If you design for the median only, then you’ll never get to median because people won’t be able to run and test the edge cases.
- bombcar 3y agoFor things like that the Rock boards are much much more powerful. Of course as you go up costs rise and eventually you might as well buy a Mac mini or similar.
- prepend 3y agoYes, there’s obviously more powerful computers for running a Minecraft server. But pis are easy to build and manage and that’s the platform my kid likes.
- _joel 3y agoMaybe not the CPU per se but I'd imagine the extra beef GPU side could be good for digital signage and entertainment.
- humanistbot 3y agoThe pi4 is powerful enough to drive multiple 4k displays while doing face detection from a camera.
- mort96 3y ago
- jfk13 3y agoYes, π⁵ ≈ 306, while 2⋅π⁴ ≈ 195. So pi^five clearly beats two pi^four. Three pi^4 would be close, though. If only we could just define pi as a nice simple integer...
- p1mrx 3y ago> It also supports USB-C Power Delivery, so finding a power supply that’s capable of supplying all that juice to the Pi 5 is a lot easier Isn't this mostly false? The Pi4 uses 15W at 5V3A. The standard says, to exceed 15W you should increase the voltage, but Pi5 increased the amperage instead. 5V5A USB-PD supplies are almost unheard of. I wonder how much a 9V3A -> 5V5A buck converter dongle would cost.
- zarzavat 3y agoYeah, ultimately if you want to run a Pi you ought to be buying an approved power supply. Trying to use random USB chargers even with a Pi 4 is a road to unhappiness. It doesn't have a battery, after all.
- comboy 3y agoYes. But also you can try putting some big cap between 5V and GND before it arrives.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoPi 4 does come with a power supply because of being even less standardized.
- coder543 3y agoI don’t agree. I found this straightforward statement: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16712/usbc-power-delivery-hits-240w-with-extended-power-range https://www.anandtech.com/show/16712/usbc-power-delivery-hit... > USB-PD R3.1 supports three charging models: > - Fixed voltage > - Programmable power supply (PPS), and > - Adjustable voltage supply (AVS). > In the fixed voltage scheme, the Standard Power Range (SPR) mode supports 3A and 5A at 5V, 9V, 15V, and 20V. That’s about as clear as it can be, assuming AnandTech is correct. Also keep in mind the existence of PPS as another data point. I have an Anker charger sitting in front of me that offers 3.3V-11V at 5A. 5V at 5A falls squarely in that range, as long as you have an e-marked cable that can support 5A. (I have no idea if the Pi 5 supports negotiating PPS, but it would increase compatibility with chargers if it does.) I agree the Pi 5 should have included a buck converter or something, but I don’t think it’s correct to say they’re not standards compliant. It’s just not a common use of the standard.
- FL33TW00D 3y agoAny data on the FLOPS of the pi5 GPU yet?
- fanf2 3y agoThe VideoCore VII has 12 QPUs at 900MHz according to https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/james-adams-and-eben-upton-on-designing-raspberry-pi-5/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/james-adams-and-eben-upton-... The VideoCore VI has 8 QPUs at 500MHz producing 32 Gflop/s according to https://github.com/Idein/py-videocore6 https://github.com/Idein/py-videocore6 So, VideoCore VII should produce about 86 Gflop/s
- FL33TW00D 3y agoExcellent thank you
- fanf2 3y agoCorrection: it seems I was a factor of 2 wrong, because Eben says in https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/image-processing-on-raspberry-pi-5-our-new-hardware-image-signal-processor/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/image-processing-on-raspber... (time code 28:58) that the VideoCore 7 has about 40-50 Gflop/s
- mort96 3y agoThe 'S' in the title should be lowercase, it's "two Pi 4s". The current title makes it sound like there's a model called "Raspberry Pi 4S" and the Pi 5 is better than two of those Pi 4S models.
- stavros 3y agoAgreed, that's how I parsed it too.
- thiht 3y agoOr maybe « two Raspberry Pis 4 »? It feels weird to have the plural mark on the model number
- guntherhermann 3y agoIn English, it would sound strange to say "Two Raspberry Pis 4", idiomatically we would probably always say "Two Raspberry Pi Fours"
- thiht 3y agoOk! thanks for the clarification
- fanf2 3y ago“Raspberry Pies 4” is arguably correct, if you consider 4 to be a postnominal adjective. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpositive_adjective https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpositive_adjective But it’s weird enough that I would only use it when being jokey.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoYes also the only reason it is capitalized in the original headline is that the headline is presented in all caps. In the article itself they say “Pi 4s”.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoIt is an artifact of the all-caps original title and should be lowercase.
- barsonme 3y ago> But second, the new Broadcom SOC finally supports the ARM cryptography extensions Wonderful, this is long overdue.
- desireco42 3y agoPi 5 is really nice but it requires a heat sink... this makes it ... whole different game to me... I think as long as there are both 4 and 5, it is good, otherwise this is fantastic they are experimenting as they should, but there is value in being low-power and versatile in my view.
- justin66 3y ago> it requires a heat sink It does not. They’ve made a point of noting that it’s faster that a Pi 4 even if you run it without a heat sink and let it throttle the cpu back when it hits the temperature limit.
- desireco42 3y agoTo me that means it does need it, otherwise you have a thing that would run fine in one moment, then crawl to a stop...
- moffkalast 3y agoThe 4 needs a heatsink as well though, otherwise it throttles under load, it just doesn't need active cooling.
- kzrdude 3y agoI've got a metal case for the pi 4 (which touches the cpu, like a heat sink) and I hope I can do the same for the pi 5 sooner or later.
- 404mm 3y agoIt’s nice they doubled the speed of SD controller but I still wish they just gave us some eMMC for the system.
- moffkalast 3y agoIt's also nice that they tripled the overall performance, but it would've been cool if there was a non-sketchy way to power the thing.
- 404mm 3y agoI know it may sound silly but the need for active cooling is a deal breaker to me. I’m still hoping to see some massive heat sink or a metal case that acts as a heat sink. But the overall Pi evolution leads towards hotter, louder and more expensive, which there are better options where you get more flops per buck.
- geerlingguy 3y agoIt's not a need, per-se. running a small service on it that only uses 10-20% CPU and just bursts now and then, I don't see it throttling. It's only running benchmarks or activity that uses one or two cores 100% all the time that runs into throttling (and even throttled, performance is a good deal better than Pi 4 unthrottled).
- undersuit 3y agoThere's the RaspiKey, an eMMC module on a microSD card breakout board. Or the Compute Module which can be even more compact than the standard Pi format.
- Havoc 3y agoJust boot off a cheap ssd. Improves the experience dramatically
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- GravityLab 3y agoAny idea if the cooling solution mentioned, either as heatsink or fan or both, significantly impacts the footprint of the unit? In terms of weight and also dimensions. Can you reasonably cool the unit under load with a fan that is almost not noticeable when it's attached to the board? Really cool stuff in any case, glad to see this product continuing to get new features and spec bumps.
- ddejohn 3y agoNot sure about the 5, but I have a heatsink and fan on my 4 and while it was designed to fit inside the official pi case (there is no evidence of active cooling from the outside), it is very noticeable in terms of sound.
- fanf2 3y agoI think the PWM fan control on the 5 should make it quieter most of the time.
- Kirby64 3y agoThey've shown off fan modules that fit underneath the usual 'pi hat' size, so it seems the answer is: no in terms of size. You'd still need cutouts for ventilation though.
- wdb 3y agoRaspberry Pi has been getting pretty expensive. Maybe I remember wrong but I think the first ones were like $30? Now they want $80+ for it.
- djbusby 3y agoMy first one was $25 (10 years ago?). But I think, from a comment on HN, that in inflation adjusted dollars for performance they are still very good.
- lvass 3y agoFactor in a proper PSU, storage, case and cooling, amd64 boxes are cheaper than Pis now. Going to replace a pi 3 server with one of those, not having to deal with ARM is a huge plus.
- kkielhofner 3y agoFor most people with self-hosting tasks amd64 is back as the way to go. As you say, there are a ton of "minipcs" on the market that directly compete with the Raspberry Pi on cost and power usage. They're typically slightly larger but the expansion options (bring your own RAM/storage) plus real I/O (with real PCIe), disk, etc IMO significantly outweighs this. They're also typically more performant and while aarch64 platform support is increasing dramatically there are still the occasions where there's a project, docker container, etc that doesn't support it. Taking it a step further, there are a TON of decommissioned/recycled corporate/enterprise SFF desktops on the market. They don't compete in terms of size (13" x 15" or so) but they can actually get close in power usage. Many of them have multiple SATA ports, real NVMe, multiple real half-height PCIe slots, significantly better USB and PCIe bandwidth, etc. With my project Willow and Willow Inference Server[0] we're trying to drive this approach in the self-hosting community with an initial emphasis on Home Assistant. They're generally sick of Raspberry PI supply shortages, very limited performance, poor I/O, flaky SD cards, etc. The Raspberry Pi is still pretty popular for "my first Home Assistant" but generally once people get bitten by the self-hosting bug they end up looking more like homelab very quickly. For Willow particularly we emphasize use of GPUs because a voice assistant can't be waiting > 10 seconds to do speech recognition and speech synthesis. There are approaches out there trying to kind of get something working using Whisper tiny but in our ample internal testing and community feedback we feel that Whisper small is the bare minimum for voice assistant tasks, with many users going all out and using Whisper large-v2 at beam size 5. With GPU it's still so fast it doesn't really matter. The Raspberry Pi is especially poorly suited for this use case (and even amd64). We have some benchmarks here[1]. TLDR a ~seven year old Tesla P4 (single slot, slot power only, half-height, used for $70) does speech recognition 87x faster, with the multiple increasing for more complex models and longer speech segments. A 3.8 second voice command takes 586ms on the Tesla P4 and 51 seconds on the Raspberry Pi 4. Even with the Pi 5 being twice as fast that's still 25 seconds, which is completely unusable. Not fair to compare GPU to Raspberry Pi but consider the economics and practicality... You can get an SFF desktop and Tesla P4 from eBay for $200 shipped to your door. It will idle (with GPU and models loaded) at ~30 watts. The CPU, RAM, disk (NVMe), I/O, etc will walk all over a Raspberry Pi anything. Add the GPU and obviously it's not even close - you end up with a machine that can easily do 10x-100x what a Raspberry Pi can do for 2x the cost and power usage. You can even throw a 2.5gb Ethernet card in another slot for $20 and replace your router if you want to go really dense. Even factoring in power usage (10-15w vs 30, 2-3x) the cost difference comes down to nearly nothing and for many users this configuration is essentially future-proof to anything they may want to do for many years (my system with everything running maxes out around 50% of one core). Many also gradually grew their self-hosted situation over the years with people ending up with three or more Raspberry Pis for different tasks (PiHole, Home Assistant, Plex, etc). At this point the SFF configuration starts to pull far head in every way including power usage. Users were initially very skeptical to GPU use, likely from taking their experience in the desktop market and assuming things like "300 watt power usage with a huge > $500 card". Now they love having a GPU around for Willow and miscellaneous other CUDA tasks like encoding/decoding/transcoding with Plex/Jellyfin, accelerated Frigate, and all kinds of other applications. Willow Inference Server (depending on configuration) uses somewhere between 1-4GB of VRAM so with an 8GB VRAM card that leaves for plenty of additional tasks. We even have users who started with the Tesla P4 and then got the LLM bug and figured out how to get an RTX 3090 working with their setup which also of course leads to absurd performance with Willow - my local RTX 3090 goes from end of speech to command completion in HA to TTS feedback in ~250ms. It's "speak, blink, done" fast. [0] - https://heywillow.io/ https://heywillow.io/ [1] - https://heywillow.io/components/willow-inference-server/#benchmarks https://heywillow.io/components/willow-inference-server/#ben...
- Wenturon 3y ago[dead]
- smcl 3y agoAre people really looking to RPi for performance though? Surely the appeal is that it’s good enough, open enough and has a bunch of peripherals and stuff you can tinker with. Or maybe I’m out of touch (obligatory: no it’s the kids… etc)
- ddingus 3y agoIncreasingly yes. I am in that group now. Basically, my hobby development has moved to Raspi machines. I use a 400 as my primary station and various 3 and 4 models to do projects with. One very nice thing is to package everything up with a Pi and have that project be self-contained. Dev tools, I/O whatever all nice and compact. Start another project? Just setup another Pi and go. Having a higher performance model means moving more of what I do onto a Pi. Things like VS Code run reasonably, but not great. On the 4, many things are close to great. The 5 appears capable enough to change that equation. Nice!
- smcl 3y agoFair play then. I genuinely thought it was just a little dev/experiment/prototype platform for people, as it was for me. If this is what you need then god speed!
- ddingus 3y agoIt is often that, so fair on your part too. What I have seen happen is people basically get going on Raspian and start to like it. Myself, I have used UNIX flavors since SGI IRIX and I find Raspian simple, well supported and easy to use. A fast Pi, plus a solid load of OSS packs quite a punch! Dev tools for many languages. Open, Libre Office and friends suddenly makes for a very cheap, effective desktop one can use to get a whole lot done. Anyone inclined to work with OSS can grab one of these little Pi computers can do a lot. I use them that way frequently.
- bmicraft 3y agoIf you don't want more performance, you can still by older and much cheaper models like the zero 2w for a quarter the price
- yieldcrv 3y agoI wish Raspberry Pi's came already constructed I just always deprioritized doing it I've built desktops in the past before, its more about disinterest in doing it at all for anything the services that will do it move the pricing of raspberry pi's to an equally as unattractive territory. might as well just get an old android phone and turn it into a server at that point.
- Beached 3y agoI'm confused. a rpi is comes already constructed? they are single board computers. all you have to do is plug in a power cord?
- yieldcrv 3y agoI usually have to add another sister board, or put a heatsink on or something discouraging
- TMWNN 3y agoI am all thumbs when it comes to hardware, and Raspberry Pi is about as easy to put together as imaginable. I purchased my Pis in "kits" provided by resellers, and assembling the kits takes about 15 seconds.
- dingosity 3y ago8 second boot times? That's only 2 seconds slower than my Commodore 64. </snark> On the less snarky side... I'm sure it's a better system, but just because a core can run at 2.4GHz instead of 1.8Ghz, you have to take power dissipation into account. You have the same problem with overclocking: you can up the clock speed, but there's still only so much thermal energy you can remove from the packaging before you have to throttle the core to avoid melting the solder off the board or delaminating the PCB underneath the package. I'm sure the good people at Broadcom have taken this into account, I'm just commenting you can't just say "oh. it has a 33% faster clock, it's going to chunk 33% more data."
- fanf2 3y agoThey shrunk the process size so the 5 is more power efficient than the 4
- nektro 3y agoi wish they'd kept the $35 price point instead of competing on performance
- zachallaun 3y agoI think someone demonstrated in the announcement thread that, adjusting for inflation, the Pi5 is going to be cheaper at release than the Pi4. Ultimately though, at least IMO, the Pi isn't about being cheap, it's about being capable while staying a great value. I bet there's a lot of hidden complexity in the pricing, and it's very possible that they'd have to compromise significantly more than 12.5% of the functionality/performance to get a 12.5% price reduction (to $35).
- johann8384 3y agoAnd an Orange Pi 5Plus is even better
- 0ct4via 3y agoIf you're going to mess with capitalization for the title, it would be better ending with "than two Pi 4s" for pluralization -- there is no "Pi 4S" model.
- Drblessing 3y agoWhat's a good CLI only OS to run on the Pi 5? Want to take the plunge.
- argulane 3y agoThe normal Raspberry Pi OS Lite is pretty okay. https://www.armbian.com/ https://www.armbian.com/ is also pretty awesome and also supports bunch of other RaspberryPi clones for cheaper price.