When it comes to single-board computers, the uncrowned king of single-board computers, the Raspberry Pi, must not be bypassed. Recently, I was fortunate enough to get the latest Raspberry Pi 5 from Farnell, and it is a high-configuration version with 8GB of RAM, so in this issue, I will actually experience this eye-catching development board.
appearance
The overall size of the Raspberry Pi 5 remains the same as the previous generation, and the hardware configuration and peripherals are different from the previous generation. For example, the 3.5mm headphone jack has been eliminated, and some long-awaited features such as a built-in real-time clock (a great feature that eliminates the need to lose power and time without network synchronization), PCIe 2.0, and a power button. Let's take a look at the main peripheral interfaces of the Raspberry Pi.
- 1 Gigabit Ethernet port with PoE+ support (requires separate PoE+ HAT);
- 2 USB 3.0 Type-A ports, both USB 3.0 have dedicated 5Gbps bandwidth (unlike the shared 5Gbps bandwidth on the Raspberry Pi 4);
- 2个USB2.0 Type-A接口；
- 1 x Fan connector;
- One 40-pin I/O expansion interface.
- 1 PCIe 2.0 port (not a standard M.2 connector, an adapter cable is required), which can be used for high-speed peripheral interfaces such as SSDs;
- 1 power button on and off;
- 1 Type-C power port;
- 1 RTC battery interface;
- 2 MicroHDMI ports, support dual 4K60 frame HDMI output;
- 1 UART port (independent of the 40PIN IO docking station, there is a separate interface);
- 2个MIPI CSI/DSI接口;
- 1 PoE port socket for power over Ethernet with Raspberry Pi's PoE expansion board;
- 1 high-speed MicroSD card slot (for loading systems burned on MicroSD cards) with SDR104 support.
The Raspberry Pi 5 core SoC is Broadcom BCM2712, which integrates 4 Arm Cortex-A76 processors inside, and supports up to 2.4GHz main frequency, which is 2~3 times higher than Raspberry Pi 4. In addition, the SoC also integrates an 800MHz VideoCore VII GPU, supports OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.2, supports 4K60 frames HDMI output, and 4K60 frames HEVC decoder. In addition to the core SoC, the Raspberry Pi 5 is also equipped with Micron's 8GB LPDDR4 SDRAM, Raspberry Pi's self-developed IO controller, Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet transceiver (BCM54213PEB1KMLG), Renesas PMIC (DA9091), dual-band (2.4GHz and 5.0GHz) 802.11ac wireless network, and Bluetooth 5.0 and BLE modules. There are two chips that are special and I think they are worth mentioning.
The first is the Raspberry Pi's self-developed IO controller, which handles most of the IO ports to reduce the load on the SoC, and is used to expand the interfaces including 40PIN IO expansion interface, USB, Ethernet, MIPI CSI/DSI, PCIe, etc., which is one of the most important innovations on the Raspberry Pi 5. Compared to the Raspberry Pi 4, the bandwidth of IO is increased, so whether it is a storage device, USB or other peripherals, it benefits from more available bandwidth.
The second is Renesas' PMIC (DA9091), which integrates eight independent switch-mode power supplies to provide various voltages for the functional blocks inside the SoC. In addition, it has two important features:
- Real-time clock (RTC), which can be powered by an external supercapacitor or a coin cell battery
- Support Raspberry Pi to implement hard/soft power and power on/off
The above is probably the peripherals and hardware configuration of the entire Raspberry Pi 5, then I will burn the official 64-bit Raspberry Pi system, power on for the actual test.
Power-on measurement
Connect the peripherals of the Raspberry Pi 5, connect the keyboard, mouse and a monitor here, power on and turn on.
You can also see some information about this SoC in the terminal command window, 4 Arm Cortex-A76 processors, the highest CPU frequency is 2.4GHz, and the lowest frequency is 1.5GHz.
The performance of this CPU was actually tested with the open-source multi-threaded performance testing tool sysbench, and the test results are as follows, which are single-core and 4-core test results, how about this performance?
It was a surprise for me! The parameters on paper are actually comparable to the N97 processor on the Nezha development board that was tested before, you must know that N97 is Intel's x86 processor. However, it is weaker than N97 in actual application scenarios, for example, when watching high-definition videos, it is obvious that there is no N97 at ease. After running continuous stress tests for a period of time, the thermal imager showed that the maximum temperature was concentrated on Renesas' PMIC, and the SoC itself dissipated heat well. In addition, because the tested board is not equipped with a heat sink, it may also affect the performance to a certain extent.
brief summary
The content of this issue has a preliminary understanding of the hardware configuration of the new Raspberry Pi 5 and the experience of using some scenarios, overall, this is a slightly better operation than the regular upgrade, which is a bit beyond expectations. The performance of the SoC is stronger, the bandwidth of the IO port is also larger, and the addition of RTC is very good, if you are interested, you can consider starting, because I think there is not much room for Raspberry Pi 6 upgrades. By the way, heavy Raspberry Pi users are recommended to install a radiator.