Originally published at: Raspberry Pi 5, finally | Boing Boing
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Expect them all to disappear within minutes, and reappear through scalpers at a 500% markup.
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Maybe I’ll be able to get a RPi4 now.
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From the announcement:
we’re going to ringfence all of the Raspberry Pi 5s we sell until at least the end of the year for single-unit sales to individuals
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I think Raspberry Pi will hang around for the same reason Arduino (still!) does, which is that they focus on the ecosystem at least as much as the hardware. Even with cheaper, more capable competitors and clones around, people will go for the original because that’s the common frame of reference, and by definition it’s not a market driven by high specs. No one would care about Pi shortages if any of the alternatives hit the spot.
I think they also gained a lot of goodwill with their Pico boards, which pleasantly surprised everyone, and were very cheap and widely available even in the middle of the pandemic. Plus, they did a fairly credible PR push about their Pi supply issues.
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What ever happened with the former-cop maker-in-residence they hired? Seems like RPi went silent after all the backlash and he’s only got a few posts on their website that I can find. Perhaps he’s just so good at working covertly we don’t even know he’s there.
Same here; I have a project that needs four of them; five if I want one to act as the processing server for the clients. (it’s a replacement for the amazon dots that runs entirely on-premise.)
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According to RPiLocator, at this point RPi4s are generally available at their list price from official resellers. And from what I’ve been seeing, they are constantly being restocked. There may be a few months of RPi5 scarcity, but that has been true with every major RPi release since it was originally introduced. Scalpers are going to have a a much smaller time window to fleece people that don’t want to wait for the pipeline to fill.
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I had a friend back some sort of kickstarter (or kickstarter like) project for a “better” “RPi like” board. By the time it shipped him two of them they were slower than the then-current RPi 3, and the “more RAM” had become “as much RAM”. About the only thing that stayed better is they had slightly more reliable FLASH to boot off of and I think the USB I/O was faster (the RPi 4 fixed that).
As you say the ecosystem is important, he never quite could get the thing to stay running for days at a time (ice, left alone it would hang in a few days…which means if you are using it to say drive a 3D printer you had better not want a print run to take longer then the board stays alive, and it is a little irritating to want to start a new print if the system died and the watchdog timer couldn’t reboot it). Meanwhile while the RPi isn’t as long term stable as I would like, it rarely hangs all by itself (it takes multiple months to lock up, and I have never had the watchdog fail to bring it back).
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Normal people won’t be getting the shaft either.
“Perhaps most importantly, the 5 is being prioritized for individual buyers rather than commercial partners.”
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And there are many.
Some with a healthier attitude toward open source than the Broadcom tainted Raspberry Pi foundation, such as Rockchip based stuff like Orange Pi - supported by mainline kernel.
And with a healthier attitude towards open hardware, to boost - my pet peeve is correcting people maintaining RPi is open HW: “Ok, show me the schematic, then”.
But yes, nice increase in performance.
Probably I’ll skip it as I skipped the RPi 4, it does not fit my use pattern (fast computers, or slow to midrange microcontrollers).
What I make wide use of is instead RP2040 - RPi Pico.
Cheap, usually powerful enough for most simple controller tasks, handy programmable IO, decent SDK and build system. The revolting HW documentation can then be tolerated, as can some very odd HW choices.
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On a Pi? The 10G controller would compete with the SoC for power consumption (and board space!), so that doesn’t sound likely any time soon. Maybe as a HAT? Especially seeing how the dearth of other high speed interfaces to make use of that bandwidth would make a port like that pretty niche.
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Can you name some of those? Not being confrontational here, I’m genuinely interested. My Pi 3 is becoming a little anemic for my server-related hobby projects, and as far as I could find with some quick searching, the only things that reliably outperform the Pi 5 would be something like the boards based on the RK3588, and those are all more expensive than the Pi 5 (and don’t enjoy the same kind of support, as far as I can tell).
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That’s a big evolution. Moving the I/O to a cheap external controller means they can use cheaper SoCs with less integrated devices, and the device tree will stay largely the same in future models.
Not to mention the PCIE x1 slot. M.2 hat is just that start, you can add any PCIE device to a Pi now. Want to drive an external GPU? No reason you couldn’t with the right cable.
Entirely possible now. 10GbE with its own power supply, connected to the PCIE connector.
The PCIe connector is PCIe 2.0x1, so it has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 4Gbps and a real world maximum bandwidth of ~80% of that. And using that interface for the NIC you’d still have nothing for that NIC to send data to/from at anywhere near 10Gbps unless you’re really into catastrophic data loss and want to software RAID two USB 3.0 SSDs.
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I don’t know, and I should probably have said “cheaper and/or more capable”.
Of drop-in Pi replacements, most probably do compete on specs more than price, since actual Pis are cheap… But if you’re not worried about pin compatibility, OS support, or being able to buy another one next year, there’s a lot of cheap SBCs out there with wifi, HDMI, A-series chips or whatever you need.
Hackaday and Liliputing write up a lot of those things, or you could just browse sparkfun / adafruit / seeed studio etc.
ETA but yes, in terms of support Raspbpi doesn’t really have any competition
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