Raspberry Pi 5 2GB Launches At $50 USD

[Vorpal]

The Pi5 doesn't need active cooling. I have one running as a home server with a metal chassi where the chassi acts as a heatsink. Works perfectly fine. Did the same for a previous Pi 4 which ran fairly hot. You have to go back before the Pi 4 to not need any heat sink at all.

For my specific use case the Pi4 and Pi5 have been pretty decent balances between power draw and computational power. Draws much less than any x86 system I own for sure.

[furtadopires]

Raspberry Pi 5 2GB Launches At $50 USD

It must be so good to live in a country with a strong economy

[sdack]

Not based on my experiences. ... The people complaining are really just complaining for the sake of complaining ...

Of course you do not have experience. All you have is a projection based off yourself. Only not everybody is you.

Air cooling wildy restricts the environments an SBC can be used in. This was the first shot in the foot for the R-Pi 5. And just down-clocking does not bring down the power draw, which is close to 30W for the R-Pi 5. This is almost as much as the latest Zen 5 mobile laptops need. What were they thinking, that they could compete here? This was the second shot in the foot. The new, smaller R-Pi 5 model tries to fix this, as well as the new Zero models. If the original R-Pi 5 was such a great design as you pretend it to be then they would just keep pushing it. Obviously are they dialling it down instead of up.

[monkeynut]

In memory-intensive workloads, I would actually expect power consumption to go up, since cycles have to be wasted swapping things in and out of memory.
For everything else, the difference is likely negligible; I'd estimate not even a half watt. Perhaps it'd be another whole watt if they included a 2nd module, but I'm sure the 4GB+ variants are just drop-in replacements for the RAM.

To be clear, I was expecting any power draw reduction to come from the new stepping, rather than the RAM.

[mb_q]

So now I want to know what does this "dark silicon" was for... The series was always for kiosks, arcades and camcorders, so it has a non-trivial GPU, camera & video codecs, those are used. NPU would be also enabled on Pi. Some advanced network stuff? Probably not in this series... Cell modem? DRM?

[letsBSD]

Its a pretty good example of how people are always going to come up with reasons to complain. When the first ones launched people lamented about how slow they were, being based on what amounted to an SoC built for set-top boxes and the graphics basically being an overgrown video decoder. Well, responding to this they've made them more and more capable (multiple large ARM cores, on-chip gigabit ethernet, PCIe, etc.) which will obviously push up the cost and the power draw.

So people naturally now complain that they draw too much power (four A76's obviously draw more than a single ARM11 core) and cost too much. Even thou that original 2012 $35 with inflation is now about $50 and they've introduced much cheaper embedded variants for times when you don't need the whole hog so to speak.

In that case, I don't want to say what I think about people like you.

I’ve had several different RPi models, mostly the 4, so I’ll focus on the 4. They were slow, had too many limitations, and were expensive for their time and the real incomes in the country I live in. The cuts they made are still unjustified to me, and I don’t understand why. To have anything functional [a disk, a clock at least], you need to add HATs, buy a case, and deal with power supply issues, etc.

Well, I knew this before I bought a few units to test. Fortunately, there was a boom for them, and prices went up significantly. So I sold them, and that’s the only good thing I can say about the RPi4 - that I was able to sell one RPi 8GB and buy a whole mini PC with an i3-1215U I bought other things with the rest of the RPi money

Now we have the RPi 5, and the 8GB version costs more than what I paid for a whole mini PC with an N100, which idles at up to 5W max and reaches 8W under load [running several servers], and hasn’t exceeded 18W yet.

And I can install an NVMe SSD, DDR5 [although there are variants with DDR4], and replaceable Wi-Fi modules. I also have multiple 2.5 GbE ports and much more.

And is the RPi powerful? No, and it never was. Is it cheap? No, and it never was.

Now we have something for $50, so probably €50 in the EU, and for $80 - probably even less - I can get a full N100 PC. And yes, they are very small. If I consider the models with built-in storage and memory, they’re tiny. There’s even a version that resembles an RPi board, exactly, but with an N100.

But I didn’t choose the N100 over the RPi just because of the price. For me, the RPi is a mistake, just like people like you, who write in the way you do about people who aren’t enthusiastic about the failed RPi.

[Phil995511]

Yep. Worst part of R-Pi 5 is the power draw and need for active cooling. The new R-Pi Zero variants are more interesting.

The RPi5 works perfectly in fanless cases like the Flirc Raspberry Pi 5 Case or the ED-Pi5 Case-B !!!

Get informed before saying anything ;-(

[Phil995511]

"Raspberry Pi 5 2GB Launches At $50 USD"

I regret that the RPI5 is not up to the performance of the Orange Pi 5 Max...

Orange Pi 5 Max is sold at only $95 for the 8 GB version and $125 for the 16 GB version.

In comparison the RPi5 is too expensive and not powerful enough ;-(

I hope a more powerful revision of the RPi with 8 cores CPU (8 nm) and a GPU capable of handling 4K video streams will be released soon !!!

I feel that RPis are always technologically behind the products offered by the competition... ;-(

[L_A_G]

Of course you do not have experience. All you have is a projection based off yourself. Only not everybody is you.

I haven't personally been one of those who tried it and concluded that it lacked what I needed. That's been people I've spoken to. First time I used one it was for an internet connected box that sat by a door and counted people that entered and exited. Second time was as a terminal to monitor and control a piece of industrial equipment in development. Third time was as a DNS server to restrict what my "smart" TV can connect to. If anything it was overkill for every single thing I've used one for.

Air cooling wildy restricts the environments an SBC can be used in.

As I already told you; If you don't need the performance levels where the active cooling is necessary you have three options:

1. Dial it down to where its no longer needed
2. Look into the Pi Zero and Pico models
3. Look into the older models (that are still available)

Regular Raspberry Pi boards have never used silicon spun for it specifically. The whole company is a spinoff from Sinclair (yes, the XZ Spectrum and QL makers) that made set-top boxes. Hence they've always used what they've known; a series of chips from Broadcom meant for cable and satellite TV set-top boxes. This is just a revision based on a "respin" of the original 5's chip with some unused hardware removed. The original chip probably isn't even available anymore.

[sdack]

The RPi5 works perfectly in fanless cases like the Flirc Raspberry Pi 5 Case or the ED-Pi5 Case-B !!!

Get informed before saying anything ;-(

No, they still overheat. You have to downclock the chip and/or limit the runtime of your software, which is backwards. And the power draw is so high that one either has to have a power line nearby or triple the battery packs, which is just as ugly. You also cannot use PoE but now need PoE+ when you want to power it over ethernet. Want to use it with a solar panel? Think again. You cannot use it in a closed box, next to other devices, or other tight spaces where there is no airflow. It is just a failed design for an SBC. The chip may be great for a settop box, but nobody really asked for a settop box. People still want an SBC that is easy to work with and versatile, which is what the R-Pi 3 and 4 were. R-Pi 5 at best fills a niche, but it is not an improvement over R-Pi 3 and 4. It brings too many problems for being a quick and simple drop-in replacement for those. R-Pi 5 is far less useful, competes with mini ITX, and I rather get me an AMD mini ITX before I bother with the R-Pi 5.