I suspect the Pi Foundation was getting really annoyed at other Pi compatible boards capturing the high end ARM SBC niche. Their flagship Pi 4's Cortex-A72 is n

I suspect the Pi Foundation was getting really annoyed at other Pi compatible boards capturing the high end ARM SBC niche. Their flagship Pi 4's Cortex-A72 is now almost a decade old and not even fast enough to run more than a very basic lightweight desktop and completely out of the question for the market section. Each Pi so far was about a 30% jump in power consumption, this time it's over 130%. They couldn't get the performance they needed, so they cranked the Pi 5 TDP beyond what was sensible to compensate. I mean 5A over 5V USB-C is borderline non-standard and basically maxing out the current port without needing a regulator. It's really funny seeing the N100, a CISC for fucks sake, get 2-3x the performance while pulling 2 watts less under load. This is their AMD Bulldozer moment.