Raspberry Pi 5
The Raspberry Pi 5 was announced today, complete with websites and influencers giving reviews based upon pre-release hardware.
Personally I'm unimpressed.
For me the raison d'etre of the Raspberry Pi has been more about price than performance. The original Raspberry Pi was little more than an SoC devkit built around a chip they could get cheap from Broadcom. People used it because it was cheap and it had just enough processing power to make it useful for a lot of microcontroller tasks which were beyond what could be done with an Ardino.
I have three Raspberry Pis (in order of purchase):
- A Raspberry Pi Zero W - originally bought to play back MPEG-2 OTA recordings (with license key to unlock the MPEG-2 hardware decoder), then repurposed for arcade & console emulation (which it was a little underpowered for), then back to playing back DVD rips.
- A Raspberry Pi 3A - the heart of my vertical barcade, once I determined the Zero wasn't quite fast enough for the job.
- A Raspberry Pi Pico - a true microcontroller, it measures the resistance of the thermistor in my water cooled computer and sends the calculated temperature over USB serial to a FanControl plugin to control the speed of the radiator cooling fans.
In each of these cases the RPi had sufficient processing power to handle the task while being also not costing a lot. And while I am certain there were other SBCs which might have been just as capable and possibly even cheaper, the RPis are generally well supported by the community; often with plug & play images.
But the primary features of the RPi5 just don't excite me. Faster USB, SD & networking - that wasn't a pain point for me. PCIe - even bigger nope. Faster CPU & RAM - again, typically not an issue. (OTOH, I had considered getting an RPi4 for horizontal arcade emulation.)
When I look at the RPi5 I see several downsides: needs active cooling, needs a bigger power adapter, and is more expensive.
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