Raspberry Pi 5 Review: The Return of the King of Single Board Computers!

When it comes to single board computers, the king without a crown—the Raspberry Pi—is a must-mention. Recently, I was fortunate enough to get the latest Raspberry Pi 5 from Element14, and it’s the high-configuration version with 8GB of RAM. So, this issue will be about experiencing this much-anticipated development board.

The overall size of the Raspberry Pi 5 remains consistent with the previous generation, but the hardware configuration and peripherals are different. For example, the 3.5mm headphone jack has been removed, and features like an integrated real-time clock (a great feature that eliminates the hassle of losing time when there is no network synchronization), PCIe 2.0, and a power button have been added—some long-awaited features. Let’s take a closer look at the main peripheral interfaces of the Raspberry Pi.

1 Gigabit Ethernet port, supports PoE+(requires a 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 USB 2.0 Type-A ports;

1 fan connector;

1 40-pin IO expansion interface.

1 PCIe 2.0 interface(not a standard M.2 connector, requires an adapter), can be used for high-speed peripheral interfaces like SSDs;

1 power switch;

1 Type-C power interface;

1 RTC battery interface;

2 MicroHDMI interfaces, supporting dual 4K60 frame HDMI output;

1 UART interface(independent of the 40PIN IO expansion seat, has a separate interface);

2 MIPI CSI/DSI interfaces;

1 PoE interface socket, combined with the Raspberry Pi’s PoE expansion board for Ethernet power supply;

1 high-speed MicroSD card slot(for loading the system burned onto the MicroSD card), supports SDR104 mode.

The core SoC of the Raspberry Pi 5 is the Broadcom BCM2712, which integrates four Arm Cortex-A76 processors, supporting a maximum frequency of 2.4GHz, providing a performance increase of 2 to 3 times compared to the Raspberry Pi 4; in addition, the SoC also integrates an 800MHz VideoCore VII GPU, supporting OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.2, and 4K60 frame HDMI output, as well as 4K60 frame HEVC decoding.

In addition to the core SoC, the Raspberry Pi 5 also features Micron 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, as well as Bluetooth 5.0 and BLE modules. Among them, two chips are particularly noteworthy, and I think they deserve mention.

One is the self-developed IO controller of the Raspberry Pi, which handles most of the IO ports to reduce the load on the SoC, used to expand interfaces including 40PIN IO expansion interface, USB, Ethernet, MIPI CSI/DSI, PCIe, etc. This is one of the most important innovations on the Raspberry Pi 5. Compared to the Raspberry Pi 4, it has increased the bandwidth of IO, so both storage devices, USB, and other peripherals benefit from more available bandwidth.

The second is Renesas’s PMIC(DA9091), which integrates eight independent switch mode power supplies, mainly providing various voltages for the internal functional modules of the SoC. In addition, it has two important functions:

Real-time clock(RTC), which can be powered by an external supercapacitor or button battery

Supports the Raspberry Pi to achieve hard power-off/soft power-off and power on/off

Above is a rough overview of the entire Raspberry Pi 5’s peripherals and hardware configuration. Next, I will flash the official 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS and power on for actual testing.

After connecting the peripherals of the Raspberry Pi 5, I connected a keyboard, mouse, and a display, and powered on.

In the terminal command window, you can also see some information about this SoC, four Arm Cortex-A76 processors, with a maximum CPU frequency of 2.4GHz, and the minimum frequency is 1.5GHz.

Using the open-source multi-threaded performance testing tool sysbench, I tested the performance of this CPU, and the test results are as follows, both single-core and quad-core test results. How is this performance?

Surprisingly!

The paper parameters can actually rival the N97 processor on the Nezha development board I tested before, and the N97 is Intel’s x86 processor. However, in actual application scenarios, it falls short of the N97. For example, watching HD videos, you can clearly feel that it doesn’t perform as well as the N97. During continuous stress testing for a period, the thermal imaging camera revealed that the highest temperature concentrated on Renesas’s PMIC, while the SoC itself has good heat dissipation. Additionally, since the tested board did not have a heatsink installed, it may also affect performance to some extent.

In this issue, we have roughly understood the hardware configuration and some usage experiences of the new Raspberry Pi 5. Overall, this is an operation that is slightly better than a routine upgrade, somewhat exceeding expectations. The SoC performance is stronger, the IO port bandwidth is larger, and the addition of RTC is excellent. If you’re interested, you might consider getting one, as I believe the upgrade space for Raspberry Pi 6 is limited. By the way, heavy Raspberry Pi users are recommended to install a heatsink.

Note: The main image of this article comes from the author’s own production, media public data, all authorized.

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