Doesn’t sound like the ‘cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on’ that the original Pi used to be. It is not as cheap and a power hungry beast, still small, though. More and more like a PC and less and less a small cheap embedded platform. For some people it is a plus (I guess for most people here), for some not so much.
I tend to build my projects on Raspberry Pi Pico now, but sometimes I would need something more powerful and Raspberry Pi 5 will be too much.
I’m agreeing with them. By the time you buy the Pi 5, and all the add-ons you need, it’s going to rival these SFF systems with full x86 Intel chips with efficiency cores.
It isn’t, you can get SFF PCs for as little as $75 on eBay that have Quicksync CPUs and will run circles around a RPi, especially if you have to do any transcoding. They are also really power efficient… 7-20W idles.
SBCs really should no longer be considered for selfhosting unless you are A) in an extremely power constrained environment like an off-grid RV or vanlife situation or B) clustering
The project goal has never been a ‘cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on’. The whole point of the project is to build a small cheap PC to give away to school children to increase computer literacy, while making it attractive enough for normal people to buy to fund the charity side
I just noticed on rpilocator that there are a couple US sellers who have RPi4-1GB boards in stock for $35. I might have to try and snag one since my Kodi device has been acting up lately.
This is true with ARM in general. There’s no “standard Linux” to boot because every board needs its own device tree and set of core kernel modules for detecting important things like local storage. It’s fairly intractable due to how different the hardware is.
I’ve heard this argumane before but that doesn’t change the fact that some socs work out of the box and require no proprietary software or custom configs
Wow, I was sure Raspberry Pi were pretty good about mainline support, especially since multiple distros support the platform.
Software support is still very good compared to pretty much every other arm board.
Currently, and I could be wrong, the alternative to a Pi 4 from Pine64 now would be a Pine64’s Quartz64 Model B. A Star64 might be interesting, but that’s RISC-V so who knows what OS you could boot on it currently and if it would even be stable.
Plus with the Quartz64 Model B, who knows if you’ll able to get a good case for it. There’s the $28 “Model B” ALUMINUM WATERPROOF ENCLOSURE, but, eh, no thanks. There’s the open enclosure, but that’s also a no for me. I want a case I can hide the device itself, the cables, put a heatsink and fan on, be able to use an SSD with USB connect and connect a power supply all stuffed in a case. Which you can find plenty of for Raspberry Pi’s.
Not to mention the Pi 5 isn’t even out yet, and it’s entirely possible it’ll be better than the Quartz64 Model B, on top of having a ton of accessories. Plus, I can Pi up practically any Pi at the Microcenter or similar store near me as opposed to having to pay for good shipping.
I’m totally for having alternatives to the Pi, heck I might pick up a Quartz64 Model B if I can find a case, but a lot of alternatives don’t have the same support and accessories the Pis do.
I’m guessing that’s because you’re using software decode? If you use HW decode it runs wonderfully in my experience. I could play raw 1080p h264 or VC1 Blu-ray rips over the network just fine**. You have to pay for VC1 and MPEG2 IIRC — otherwise it will try to play in software which is no good. This was an rpi3 with Kodi on Raspbian.
Interestingly I believe they removed MPEG2 and VC1 HW support in the 4, so those files play better on a 3 than a 4. But if your media is in h264 and you use a supported player it should work great on a 4.
** I think NFS worked best, and of course over Ethernet. Maybe http also worked (iirc samba would stutter occasionally).
Thanks! I may be in the market for a little server. Currently running stuff off a pine a64 but arm is killing me for some stuff (specifically playwright with chrome)
One of the most exciting additions to the Raspberry Pi 5 feature set is the single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface.
IIUC PCIe2.0x1 means 0.5GB/s, which is slower than USB 2 (I’m talking USB 2 specs - no idea how USB actually performs in PIs). I can’t wait for people to buy that NVME hat and mount WD Blacks on that :)
USB 2 is 480 Mb/s, not 480 MB/s. 480 Mb/s is 60 MB/s, so the 500 MB/s from PCIe 2.0 x1 is quite a bit faster and is about the limit of what a SATA 3 interface could do. Also, sequential throughput isn’t nearly as important as most people think. Random IO, which NVMe drives excel at, will make a far more noticeable impact on real world performance.
I’ve been eyeing an Orange Pi 5+ for my RPi4 upgrade — think I may stick with that route, but glad to see RPi putting out another model.
My experience with RPis over the years was that the multimedia was way better supported than alternatives, but for self hosting that’s not really relevant for me (headless, and don’t really care about transcoding).
I ordered an OrangePi 3 recently for pihole purposes and it has been great, it’s also probably overkill for this use but hey it was actually in stock and not terribly expensive.
It’s not the everyman buying from scalpers its industry buying cheap pis over plc, when it’s that much cheaper scalper prices isnt much to them. And they need them NOW. Gotta love just in time manufacturing.
I didn’t know they were that hard to find now. I have a few of every generation and they were never hard to find, or expensive. Must have bought my 4s before the pandemic as well I guess
2 dual purpose DSI/CSU connectors (you can now use two displays or two cameras instead of one of each)
A PCIE FPC ribbon connector like the one used for DSI/CSI (you don’t need a hat, just a ribbon) also the pi4 did not have any accessible PCIE lanes, only the cm4 did. Also the pi5 is capable of PCIE Gen3
More bandwidth for the usb3 connectors
more bandwidth for Wi-Fi (reports are it gets about double the bandwidth despite using the same Wi-Fi chip)
Fully SMD board, no through-hole components.
There’s plenty of stuff I would have liked to see that didn’t make it, but there definitely a lot more to it than an RTC and a power button. For $60 this is not a bad SBC at all.
I would have liked to see normal HDMI connectors, 2.5G Ethernet with PoE included, and higher RAM options.
More PCIe lanes would have been nice too but probably unlikely given the price point
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Thank you friendly robot :) I couldn’t stop assuming PoE meant Pillars of Eternity! 😅
For me it was Path of Exiles.
I don’t think the SATA acronym is right…
Comparison using perplexity.ai
Doesn’t sound like the ‘cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on’ that the original Pi used to be. It is not as cheap and a power hungry beast, still small, though. More and more like a PC and less and less a small cheap embedded platform. For some people it is a plus (I guess for most people here), for some not so much.
I tend to build my projects on Raspberry Pi Pico now, but sometimes I would need something more powerful and Raspberry Pi 5 will be too much.
I think they still make the older ones if you want something middle-of-the-road.
Yes, the numbers on a Pi aren’t referring to a “version” like with the iPhone, but to it’s power. A Pi Zero isn’t the oldest, it’s the simplest.
I’m not sure I’d call 5 watts “power hungry.”
You can buy beelink small form factor pcs from Amazon for around $150 with cases and power supplies included.
This is what I ended up doing last year and it’s been great.
But…he said that it’s not as cheap as it used to be and too power hungry and you propose an 150$ PC?
I’m agreeing with them. By the time you buy the Pi 5, and all the add-ons you need, it’s going to rival these SFF systems with full x86 Intel chips with efficiency cores.
Well, yes if you need “all the add-ons”.
Case, cooler, power supply, storage at minimum, dongle/adapters probably too.
I meant IF you need all the add-ons, otherwise the price gap is huge
It isn’t, you can get SFF PCs for as little as $75 on eBay that have Quicksync CPUs and will run circles around a RPi, especially if you have to do any transcoding. They are also really power efficient… 7-20W idles.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/195163970881
SBCs really should no longer be considered for selfhosting unless you are A) in an extremely power constrained environment like an off-grid RV or vanlife situation or B) clustering
I’ve used pine64 boards for this. They have a few more options and are always available.
The project goal has never been a ‘cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on’. The whole point of the project is to build a small cheap PC to give away to school children to increase computer literacy, while making it attractive enough for normal people to buy to fund the charity side
So the current benefit is: it’s small? At which point run tablets. :)
Tablets don’t have gpios tho
and are annoying/impossible to use a more server oriented OS on
Zero and zero 2 have decent stock anymore.
They don’t have Ethernet port :( Do they support full OS?
Pi zero W has WiFi, alternatively there are hats available. And yes they can run a full Rasbian OS.
Isn’t the Pi 3B still available for that kind of job?
If you can find a new one. They are $45+ on ebay used. None of the usual US sellers has any.
I just noticed on rpilocator that there are a couple US sellers who have RPi4-1GB boards in stock for $35. I might have to try and snag one since my Kodi device has been acting up lately.
But there already is a device that answer that specific need, so it wouldn’t make sense for the Raspberry 5 to replace it.
And the 4B
Right now getting compute modules is the hard part. When the inevitable CM5 comes out…
Not that easily and cheaply as they used to be.
Don’t go for a Pi. They don’t run stock Linux anyway.
I would get a board from pine64. There are also plenty of other options that are cheaper
Used mini PCs are also an option
They can, just need correct drivers. We have mainline Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu for them now.
Define “stock Linux.”
deleted by creator
I guess he means that raspberry pi doesn’t run a mainline kernel
Precisely. You can’t just boot up any arm image
This is true with ARM in general. There’s no “standard Linux” to boot because every board needs its own device tree and set of core kernel modules for detecting important things like local storage. It’s fairly intractable due to how different the hardware is.
I’ve heard this argumane before but that doesn’t change the fact that some socs work out of the box and require no proprietary software or custom configs
Yeah for the majority of standardized hardware solutions sure. But the Pi is an one-off, as well as all the other single board computers. IANALOSD.
Wow, I was sure Raspberry Pi were pretty good about mainline support, especially since multiple distros support the platform.
Software support is still very good compared to pretty much every other arm board.
Currently, and I could be wrong, the alternative to a Pi 4 from Pine64 now would be a Pine64’s Quartz64 Model B. A Star64 might be interesting, but that’s RISC-V so who knows what OS you could boot on it currently and if it would even be stable.
Plus with the Quartz64 Model B, who knows if you’ll able to get a good case for it. There’s the $28 “Model B” ALUMINUM WATERPROOF ENCLOSURE, but, eh, no thanks. There’s the open enclosure, but that’s also a no for me. I want a case I can hide the device itself, the cables, put a heatsink and fan on, be able to use an SSD with USB connect and connect a power supply all stuffed in a case. Which you can find plenty of for Raspberry Pi’s.
Not to mention the Pi 5 isn’t even out yet, and it’s entirely possible it’ll be better than the Quartz64 Model B, on top of having a ton of accessories. Plus, I can Pi up practically any Pi at the Microcenter or similar store near me as opposed to having to pay for good shipping.
I’m totally for having alternatives to the Pi, heck I might pick up a Quartz64 Model B if I can find a case, but a lot of alternatives don’t have the same support and accessories the Pis do.
I’m waiting for my RISC-V boards. Fuck this.
Why wait?
Oh wow that’s cool. Any competitors? Does it actually perform better than RPI?
Pine64 have some RISC-V boards. Not sure how far are they with support.
Another board that can’t play 1080p? Fantastic!
What do you mean? It does 4k @ 60hz.
Video? Not just screen resolution?
I have a RPi3 and can’t play anything above 720p.
So you’re comparing the new pi with one 2 generations back that runs at 1/4th the performance and assuming they work the same?
I’m guessing that’s because you’re using software decode? If you use HW decode it runs wonderfully in my experience. I could play raw 1080p h264 or VC1 Blu-ray rips over the network just fine**. You have to pay for VC1 and MPEG2 IIRC — otherwise it will try to play in software which is no good. This was an rpi3 with Kodi on Raspbian.
Interestingly I believe they removed MPEG2 and VC1 HW support in the 4, so those files play better on a 3 than a 4. But if your media is in h264 and you use a supported player it should work great on a 4.
** I think NFS worked best, and of course over Ethernet. Maybe http also worked (iirc samba would stutter occasionally).
Well it isn’t meant to be a gaming PC. Poor gaming performance seems an odd thing to complain about.
They’re talking about playing video, not games
Ah, I misunderstood.
Never got over social-media-a**hole-gate.
Out of curiosity is there an equivalent SBC to this new 5 model out there?
What’s the social media asshole gate thing you’re talking about? Any links? I’m curious…
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisstokelwalker/raspberry-pi-hired-ex-cop-mastodon-controversy
https://medium.com/@jmproffitt/the-raspberry-pi-social-media-incident-shows-some-mastodon-admins-need-more-moderation-chops-afa3b00be90b
I wonder why they didn’t add usb-c
Power is USB-C, but the ports aren’t because most PC accessories are still USB-A
Since switching my server to an x86 based platform, I’m not jumping back to arm any time soon. Maybe some day
Curious, what hardware are you running?
Optiplex with an i5 8500. Before that was using a celeron that used like 6w max
Thanks! I may be in the market for a little server. Currently running stuff off a pine a64 but arm is killing me for some stuff (specifically playwright with chrome)
IIUC PCIe2.0x1 means 0.5GB/s, which is slower than USB 2 (I’m talking USB 2 specs - no idea how USB actually performs in PIs). I can’t wait for people to buy that NVME hat and mount WD Blacks on that :)
USB 2 is 480 Mb/s, not 480 MB/s. 480 Mb/s is 60 MB/s, so the 500 MB/s from PCIe 2.0 x1 is quite a bit faster and is about the limit of what a SATA 3 interface could do. Also, sequential throughput isn’t nearly as important as most people think. Random IO, which NVMe drives excel at, will make a far more noticeable impact on real world performance.
Good catch on my megabit vs megabyte blunder!
I’ve been eyeing an Orange Pi 5+ for my RPi4 upgrade — think I may stick with that route, but glad to see RPi putting out another model.
My experience with RPis over the years was that the multimedia was way better supported than alternatives, but for self hosting that’s not really relevant for me (headless, and don’t really care about transcoding).
I ordered an OrangePi 3 recently for pihole purposes and it has been great, it’s also probably overkill for this use but hey it was actually in stock and not terribly expensive.
Coming to a scalper near you!
Preorders are available now
…at several vendors, this was just the first one I pulled up.
You’re looking at a month or so wait for delivery at the most if you order now.
Yesterday they still had first batch available so maybe other vendors still do too.
I don’t think the pi5 will suffer the same availability issues the pi4 has
Sold by a scalper near you five seconds after it’s sold out at launch
Just wait until the market stabilizes.
These aren’t GPUs in the crypto boom, they don’t produce their own profit. Stop buying from scalpers and the price will crater.
It’s not the everyman buying from scalpers its industry buying cheap pis over plc, when it’s that much cheaper scalper prices isnt much to them. And they need them NOW. Gotta love just in time manufacturing.
Was able to get rpi3bs easy…4 drops…never saw one that wasn’t overpriced scalped shit.
4s were pretty easy to find pre 2020, I bought one at launch and 2 more before the pandemic hit and I never paid more than MSRP for any of them.
I didn’t know they were that hard to find now. I have a few of every generation and they were never hard to find, or expensive. Must have bought my 4s before the pandemic as well I guess
The only difference between this and a pi4 is the addition of an RTC and a power button. Still only one lane of pcie2.0 and PoE only with a HAT.
That’s quite an understatement.
It has:
There’s plenty of stuff I would have liked to see that didn’t make it, but there definitely a lot more to it than an RTC and a power button. For $60 this is not a bad SBC at all.
I would have liked to see normal HDMI connectors, 2.5G Ethernet with PoE included, and higher RAM options.
More PCIe lanes would have been nice too but probably unlikely given the price point
Sorry I meant to say ‘useful features’.
Cm4 carrier boards are where the IO should be.
They also removed the headphone jack and use their own custom silicon to control the I/O basically just hired Tim Cook to design it
Sounds fantastic!
Fan-tastic! 🤭