Raspberry Pi 5 Benchmarks: Significantly Better Performance, Improved I/O

[SteamPunker]

My guess would be that such development started years ago when AV1 is not a thing and VP9 is hardly a success outside of YouTube, and they paid the license fee already to integrate HEVC and now it is too late/too costly to do another switch for this generation.

AV1 most definitely is a thing. Other streaming services besides YouTube (notably Netflix) support it now as well. Just look at the list of members of the Alliance for Open Media: all the major players (even Apple) are there.

People are conflating the h.264 vs. VP9 generation with the h.265 vs AV1 generation. In the former case, it was clearly no context, since h.264 had a huge head start and also outperformed VP9 in some metrics. But h.265 didn't have nearly as big of a an advantage (if any) over AV1 out of the gate. Neither in terms of adoption nor in terms of performance/quality.

AV1 is a thing. This myth of only standards with the prestige of an "h.2xx" name being the only legitimate industry standards for video compression needs to be debunked for once and for all.

We're not accepting the absurdity of having to pay royalties for still image formats, and these days also much less so for audio compression formats, now that the patents for MP3 and most AAC profiles have expired (thank goodness), and also not for 3D acceleration standards such as OpenGL, Vulkan, and even Direct3D. So why are we accepting this for video compression standards?

[SteamPunker]

My guess would be that such development started years ago when AV1 is not a thing and VP9 is hardly a success outside of YouTube, and they paid the license fee already to integrate HEVC and now it is too late/too costly to do another switch for this generation.

h.265/HEVC and AV1 came out around the same time. It's not like with h.264 vs. VP8 or even VP9, in which case h2.64/AVC indeed had a huge head start.

So even if development started years ago, there is no reason to have focused on h.265 so much, especially since the patent situation for that format is even crazier than in the case of h.264.

[brent]

AV1 most definitely is a thing. Other streaming services besides YouTube (notably Netflix) support it now as well. Just look at the list of members of the Alliance for Open Media: all the major players (even Apple) are there.

Sure, nowadays AV1 is a thing, but do you know how long chip design, product design and software development takes? Especially for a (comparatively) small company like Raspberry Pi? It's not unlikely that the basics of the BCM2712 design were already finalized when Pi 4 hit the market, i.e. four years ago. At that time, AV1 ecosystem was still in infancy, it was unclear if it would take off, and to top it off AV1 decoding IP wasn't readily available.

Combined with the fact that AV1 decoding is hard and requires significant chip space, it either was an easy decision to skip it to reduce costs or possibly it wasn't even on the radar.

[brent]

h.265/HEVC and AV1 came out around the same time. It's not like with h.264 vs. VP8 or even VP9, in which case h2.64/AVC indeed had a huge head start.

So even if development started years ago, there is no reason to have focused on h.265 so much, especially since the patent situation for that format is even crazier than in the case of h.264.

Eh, that's grossly incorrect. H.265 spec was finalized in 2013. AV1 spec was finalized in 2018. That's a massive five year difference!

[fazalmajid]

SATA makes even less sense: it's slow, designed for mechanical drives and completely outdated by now. If anything, eMMC module support would have been nice and so much more suitable than NVMe or SATA.

eMMC is obsolete, dog-slow and grotesquely overpriced. It would be completely pointless in a device that claims to aim for performance.

[brent]

eMMC is obsolete, dog-slow and grotesquely overpriced. It would be completely pointless in a device that claims to aim for performance.

It really isn't... the later eMMC standards allow for speeds of up to 250 MB/s. Sure, it's not NVMe, but it's designed for a completely different purpose, form factor and power consumption level. So it's much more suitable for SBCs where that matters a whole lot. The advantages of eMMC compared to modern A-class or industrial SD cards are rather small, though.

Maybe UFS will be a good replacement for eMMC/microSD, but it's still early days for the technology.

[t.s.]

What about the GPU driver for the Rockchip SoC ? Does it have a proper Mesa driver ?
The last time I checked RPI still has a better software support.

It's explained on previous posts. The BSP, GPU etc still not comparable with RPi, of course. But close. But for people that use the OPi5 for server/router/the like, it's still bearable.

[t.s.]

-snip- wrong reply.

[spykes]

It's explained on previous posts. The BSP, GPU etc still not comparable with RPi, of course. But close. But for people that use the OPi5 for server/router/the like, it's still bearable.

As an headless device I can understand the appeal of the OPI5 as long as you have enough kernel support for it.
But considering the RPI5 as a small computer for retro-emulation for example, it seems a better fit.

[PeeJay]

So many people poo pooing this thing yet they sell in the 10's of millions!!