> Finally, my commercial display can run Crysis! (Ok, maybe not, but that USB 3 upgrade is sweet).

It actually can! .... if you also plug in a GPU. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/amd-radeon-pro-w7700-...

>Classic Pi Foundation pricing gymnastics

To be fair, theyve dropped the 1GB model, so do you want to compare old and new lowest specs?

I don't know about relative sales figures, I infer that 8GB is expected to be the default going forward.

As someone who spent many months designing a product around CM4 and then waiting for more than 2 years for modules to arrive over the parts shortage era (eta kept being pushed out by the distributor) I will never put myself in that position ever again. The solution I have found was to skill up and learn how to do hardware design myself. At that point there are many more options. Understandably that's not ideal for a lot of people.

While we have never used the compute module in large quantities, we have used it numerous times for small batches with 1-2k/month and had no issue there

If you plan on using it for small series of <10k/a I wouldn't worry too much

Even if it were reliably available in such quantities, I'm not sure Pi's pricing would make sense in the context of any mass produced product.

In general, the pi SoM usually offer 8 to 12 year availability maps, and haven't pulled price ballooning after launch.

If you are producing less than 1k pcs a month, than it certainly makes sense for smaller design runs. That being said, it is probably safer to eat the cost on the standard 0.1" ribbon cable header form-factor if you plan to run the line for a few years. The compute-modules have a tendency to change, and the micro-contact headers could be a failure point in some situations. Also, hardening the Pi design to be more reliable takes extensive testing, and experience.

Compared to other SoM manufacturers the Raspberry Pi foundation has a good reputation in both the open source community, and commercial roles. The pi4/5 FCC modular pre-compliance also saves around 11k USD when you go for lab testing. Also, pushing pi SoM production volumes higher means lower unit costs for everyone, and a double win is always nice.

If you don't need the gpio, than a mini PC form factor may offer more value.

There is also the Kria KR260 kits around, but it will not offer anywhere near the software/kernel ecosystem support of the pi community.

Best of luck, =3

i have. avoid pis in retail products period unless you work at broadcom or want to sell a subpar device

Probably a better idea to go for the ROCK-chip TFA is using in the benchmarks or something similar.

The best one for that (IMHO, though I should note this company sent me one to test, and it's been running my NVR for months now) is the Axzez Interceptor: https://www.axzez.com/product-page/interceptor-carrier-board

It's purpose-built for that, and they even have a rackmount chassis for it, though you could design your own too. Power for the drives requires a separate power supply though.

The other option right now is the Radxa Taco (https://radxa.com/products/io-board/taco/), but availability has been scarce. I've ordered one and will hopefully test it again soon, with the CM5!

(That is, if you're wanting to go down the Pi NAS route—there are certainly other options out there!)

In all honesty, and considering that everything you build with a SBC is not that powerful and a cabling mess, I would recommend to go for a refurbished ThinkCenter Tiny or similar + an external HDD Rack. Atleast thats the route I went, and I am vastly less annoyed about it.

These are raspberry hats that allow that, like the radxa penta sata hat or the geekworm x1009. I don't know how good they are though

Odroid H4+. Four SATA ports, 2x 2.5gig Ethernet, IBECC. Not a compute module/carrier board combination though. Also x86_64.

It isn't strictly a dropin but it is usually a great upgrade. If you have the power then video encoding is faster and higher quality on the RPi5. If you are battery constrained then it can certainly be worse.

Apparently the new ARM cores can do decoding faster than the Pi 4's hardware decoder. But no encoding, in fact.

The Pi 4 encoder was in hardware but that doesn't imply it was ever actually particularly fast. I'd bet the Pi 5 CPU+RAM improvements are enough to beat the hardware encoder of the Pi 4 and still have enough CPU leftover to beat the Pi 4 CPU unloaded.

Depends if you’re encoding video or not, surely?

I'm guessing that's with whatever stock software/firmware stack Raspberry PI themselves ship, surely can be made a lot faster by not having to probe various hardware ports you know aren't used, for example.

Milliseconds, even!

The Zero 2W has much better availability and at $15 it should still be cheap enough to essentially be a no-brainer if specs fit your needs.

Are they implemented on bare metal, or is modern synthesiser just a regular computer with a keyboard attached?

There are Pi-based laptops (Pi-Top, CrowPi), but it's very hard to compete with used laptops. And not many people like ARM-based OSes (which is usually Linux or the awful version of Windows).

> Would a USB3 external drive help with this?

Emphatically yes. It's an entirely different experience using a RPi 4 with a quality SSD. [0] It's also more expensive, so you have to decide whether that's important to you.

[0] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/portable...

In my opinion it's a mistake to split the difference with a cheap SSD or one you need to plug in using a SATA to USB adapter. (troubleshooting first step: if it's not the power supply, it's the SATA to USB adapter...)

Perhaps the M.2 HAT+ and a decent SSD?

USB3 could plausibly be faster than the SD card as the spec allows for 5Gbps+ but I don't know about Pis that much, I'd defer to someone with experience.

As a photographer I can tell you that SD cards, even high class ones have laughably awful speeds - any proper camera that needs to do video will use CFexpress Type B cards which are tremendously faster.

I'm always astounded how little people know about this, but you need to get an Application Class rated card, preferably A2. [1] The application rating essentially ensures a certain minimum IOPS performance, which is critical because most cards are only intended for sequential reads/writes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#Application_Performanc...

The Pi 4's IO is not great, but the choice of SD card affects it a lot. Brand seems to have more of an impact than speed (or at least the stated speed of the card). Cheap knockoffs will absolutely kill performance. That's why Raspberry Pi started selling their own branded SD cards.

Using an external USB3 drive also helps but it's still pretty slow. I found it too slow to use as a SAMBA file server when connected over WiFi, even though it was hardly pushing the CPU or memory. It would regularly fail to transfer large files.

One of the main selling points of the Pi 5 is faster IO. I'd love to see something tiny and power-sipping like the Zero but with the enhanced IO of the Pi 5.

There is quite a bit of variation between SD cards, browser taking several seconds is surprisingly bad.

On Pi 4 I use a 2.5" SATA SSD (WD blue) on a startech USB3 adaptor and the performance seems to me much better than even good quality microsd cards.

No it's not just you. I/O on the Pi4 and below is awful, but for most applications it doesn't matter. Not sure on the Pi 5 as I jumped ship after the scalping and overall negativity around the foundation's activities in the last few years but I expect it's a fair bit better.

In general, sdcards are slow... most use kernel cache lazy page flush if the pi4 has 8GB ram, and F2FS to improve flash reliability.

After, "sudo apt-get install preload" it will cause previously used programs from the last session to auto-cache into ram. Combined with the above setting, the usual programs will launch much faster.

There is also the option to use an external SSD drive for better performance.

Part of the fun of pi4 was getting the OS optimized, but unless you have a legitimate "Sandisk Extreme Pro U3" or >30MB/sec rated sdcard it can still be slow (people have seen 4MB/sec on old counterfeit cards.)

sdcard bus overclocking is a thing as the pi tries to maximize slow hardware compatibility by default. Note this feature is limited on the pi4, but can significantly decrease boot times on older models.

YMMV =)

There is no "Broadcom-modified kernel". There's a fork with changes needed to support all Pi hardware at https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux. Unlike some boards were you're eternally stuck at old versions, the fork is actively maintained (currently mostly at 6.6, soon 6.12) with its changes regularly getting upstreamed. You post make it sound like the Pi kernel is a mess, which it is absolutely not.

I was tempted to do something similar when I got my Yellow because the low availability of the CM4s back then, but it seemed that, at least with older Radxas there were problems with kernels or compatibility. It might work with the newer one if you say it's mainline kernel but haven't found anything in the forum in quick search...

Credit cards are bigger than you think. The CM5 is smaller (55mm x 40mm) than credit card (85mm x 54mm). You could almost get two on one credit card.

I always thought it was deceptive to compare regular Pi to credit card. But I just checked and credit card is almost the same size as regular Pi.

> when something is clearly much, much larger than a credit card

Is it? Too me it seems smaller both in width and depth, but the height seems some mm or more than a typical credit card.

I guess "mostly" refers to the "drop-in upgrade", not to the 2-3x faster. The pinout has been modified slightly, so it's not 100% compatible.

As the article says, you pay for that with a lack of support compared to the Raspberry Pi.

Technically the BCM2712 doesn't have any hardware encode support, only software/CPU.

It includes an H.265 (up to 4K 60 fps) hardware decode block—I tested that, and it works fine—but no other video hardware encode/decode, unfortunately.

The CPU is good enough for up to H.264 1080p encode at least, and with some tweaking could get a 4K stream or multiple HD streams encoded... but it's not ideal for that use case.

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/11/27/home-assistant...

Thanks to Raspberry Pi providing us with an early sample, we have been able to add Compute Module 5 (CM5) compatibility to the Home Assistant Yellow