The Raspberry Pi Foundation reveals details on its next single-board computers, including PCIe support

[Redaktion]

In an interview, CEO and Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton has revealed the company's intentions for future single-board computers. Apparently, the Pi Foundation has the Raspberry Pi 4A and Raspberry Pi 5 in the pipeline, along with new a Raspberry Pi touchscreen display.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Raspberry-Pi-Foundation-reveals-details-on-its-next-single-board-computers-including-PCIe-support.551607.0.html

[Bobbobbobbybob]

Great bit of clickbait...

Mention pi5 in headline, then say its not being worked on in article.

[Petr Seliger]

Lets talk about what matters, for example about deliveries of RP4....
Orders from February not fulfilled and only delays and delays.
Chip supply is for sure the reason, but they have to have at least some schedules they could share...

[Jimmmm]

You'd think that, right? I work for a small design company and we're changing designs daily to work around stock shortages. If you find parts you need to order them within hours, but if management has to OK a large order and doesn't respond until tomorrow, now something is sold out.

For the Pi, they can't change the design to work around shortages. Some components have drop in replacements from other vendors, but not all do. Even when they're supposed to be pin compatible, they might have subtle differences.

And all the ICs (doesn't matter if they're microcontrollers or voltage regulators) are going to the automotive industry.

We still haven't talked about shipping delays. Ports are backed up, ships are over filled and occasionally losing containers into the ocean. If you have any order large enough to need container shipping, good luck tracking that. It can arrive in port and clear in a week or 6.

The Pi foundation is much larger purchaser than my employer, but it wouldn't surprise me if they really can't get accurate timelines right now. Until we (or rather the assembly houses we contact with) have taken delivery of components, we can't say for sure.

[Anonymousgg]

Great bit of clickbait...

Mention pi5 in headline, then say its not being worked on in article.

There's new Pi5 details in the article, but they are vague. I'll have to listen to the podcast to hear what he said exactly. All the comments on that podcast are complaining about Eben's audio quality.

I'm skeptical that they would consider adding more than 8 GB of RAM so soon. Actually you should be skeptical of anything Eben says since he misled ahead of the Pi4 release. A better processor = duh and 2.5 GbE should be easy for them to add 1-3 years from now..

[Neonfish]

Pausing development on PI5 sounds reasonable to me. If you can't get the chips for your current kit what hope have you to get the upgraded/ new chips for the latest dev and then let down customers who want the latest tech. Wait a bit of time and work out what you can get and when, then design around that and maintain a good client base.

Losing the 2 mini HDMI and downgrading to a single post does not sound good to me. We code on one screen and run results on the second screen with debugging on the first screen. To need to switch apps on the screen breaks concentration and costs time. I would happily loose 2 USB ports to make space as I can extend a single port with an external set of USBs if necessary. If they could use the USB as a Video port with  an adapter (like the pi Zero mini HDMI) as a second HDMI screen that would be useful.

An updated touch screen....update to what. A touch screen does almost what it says on the tin. Only if it was bigger, or brighter, or had integrated flat speakers on the back could you call it an update IMHO

[Russ]

Losing the 2 mini HDMI and downgrading to a single post does not sound good to me.

Keep in mind that the target market for a Raspberry Pi is and always has been educational use. For schools and children, a single HDMI is likely better than needing adapters for every Pi.

[PSE]

I am aware about all the issues with todays supplies. I need to get around with all the issues regarding components, shipments and redesigns to currently available solutions. The PI could not be exchanged easily, because you do need to redo certification....
But where i am dealing with hunderts, they deal with millions of pieces and for sure they do talk to chip manufacturer directly. And i expect because of this they have better overview which they could share.
If you get delivery information June in Feb, you can live with that. Now, after 4 shifts i am on end of August.
To talk about the future is nice, but that does not help the customers trapped in design, which is not available. And actually this was reason to use the PI, mainly availability and software support.

[Anonymousgg]

Pausing development on PI5 sounds reasonable to me. If you can't get the chips for your current kit what hope have you to get the upgraded/ new chips for the latest dev and then let down customers who want the latest tech. Wait a bit of time and work out what you can get and when, then design around that and maintain a good client base.

Losing the 2 mini HDMI and downgrading to a single post does not sound good to me. We code on one screen and run results on the second screen with debugging on the first screen. To need to switch apps on the screen breaks concentration and costs time. I would happily loose 2 USB ports to make space as I can extend a single port with an external set of USBs if necessary. If they could use the USB as a Video port with  an adapter (like the pi Zero mini HDMI) as a second HDMI screen that would be useful.

An updated touch screen....update to what. A touch screen does almost what it says on the tin. Only if it was bigger, or brighter, or had integrated flat speakers on the back could you call it an update IMHO

Pi4 seemed like it would be long-lived and the chip shortage makes that more likely. You should never trust Eben Upton in these interviews though; there can always be a surprise Pi5 release.

Single HDMI is fine for a smaller A model. It's not the model you want hooked up to dual displays. Losing USB3 for PCIe would be a surprise, but maybe it will make sense for some use cases.

They aren't going to tell you what the touch screen update will be. Higher resolution is probable, and maybe a bigger size. Look at the touch screen they sell. It's 800x480 at 7". It's a tough sell in 2021.

The future of Pi Zero might be more interesting than the main model. Their competitors are already putting quad-A53 in that form factor. Instead of micro-USB and mini-HDMI, they could use as many USB-C ports as they can fit on it. They can at least quadruple the RAM to 2 GB and satisfy many use cases. Maybe they should wait for a better node than 28nm before updating it.

[David Farley]

Snarky reply.... (pi is for kids and schools). funny No child or school I know of even knows what the pi is.

[Langerz82]

Raspberry Pi 5 (My dream)

CPU: Snapdragon 888.
RAM: 16gb DDR5

2 - USB 3.0
Wireless and Bluetooth 5

beast heat sink!
up to 80mm fans ahahahaha!

Awwww yeah!

[nobitakun]

Why the heck they are going to use a Snapdragon CPU when the guy works for Broadcom? It's going to be a Broadcom SoC, like it or leave it.

Anyways, what the company needs to do is to segmentate the market. Have one line of Raspberries for school like it's been for years with various models with moderate specs but low price, another for handheld devices focused on very low power usage with less I/O ports and another for heavy tasks, such as high end CPU+GPU + various configurations of decent amount of RAM, for use on virtualization, emulation or high server load tasks. Any of the configurations could have something like a Type-C port that could output to 1 or 2 screens up to 2160p60Hz, so you don't need to include 2 video ports. The adapter would come or not with the boards, being able to hook up a standard Type-C to video cable anyways if we only need one monitor. Those adapters are not a big investment, HDMI + VGA is about 8€.

That way everyone would be happy of choosing the one they want for the purpose they need.

[Anonymousgg]

Why the heck they are going to use a Snapdragon CPU when the guy works for Broadcom? It's going to be a Broadcom SoC, like it or leave it.

Anyways, what the company needs to do is to segmentate the market. Have one line of Raspberries for school like it's been for years with various models with moderate specs but low price, another for handheld devices focused on very low power usage with less I/O ports and another for heavy tasks, such as high end CPU+GPU + various configurations of decent amount of RAM, for use on virtualization, emulation or high server load tasks. Any of the configurations could have something like a Type-C port that could output to 1 or 2 screens up to 2160p60Hz, so you don't need to include 2 video ports. The adapter would come or not with the boards, being able to hook up a standard Type-C to video cable anyways if we only need one monitor. Those adapters are not a big investment, HDMI + VGA is about 8€.

That way everyone would be happy of choosing the one they want for the purpose they need.

I don't think they should bother creating different tiers of CPU+GPU per gen. One size fits all is cheaper and easier, they want to use cheap older nodes like 28nm as long as they can, and performance is becoming acceptable (on the CPU side). Pi 5 with 4x Cortex-A75 would be good enough for most users, and they could increase the core count for a Pi 6 at the same time they move away from 28nm.

The GPU is awful, and they might want to boost it to target machine learning (for education, the cameras that they sell, and robotics).

To segment the market, they could reintroduce the Model A, and put more expensive I/O features in the Model B. 2/4/8 GB RAM is fine for Model A, but they could add a higher SKU for Model B. I guess 12 GB if not 16 GB. I didn't expect them to do that for Pi 5 but Eben Upton wants us to think it's a possibility.

The education market is eating up the Pi 400, that is the product for them. Nothing needs to change for a Pi 500, except maybe bringing back the 3.5mm jack and including an 8 GB RAM SKU.

[Nope]

Please focus on make an ATX motherboard, with ARM cpu, with pci-e, sata, a standard ATX power connector, and ram slots. Thank you.

Why we have to keep asking for these I don't know. There's a huge market for them, but all we keep getting is really expensive, broken, buggy boards.

Sort it out Raspberry Pi, get us a <£200 ATX ARM motherboard.

[Pie eater]

"give us ARM ATX morherboard"

-You are the only one in world what wants one. ATX ?!? Do they still even make ATX?
There are literally hundreds if not thousands on ITX ARM and embedded MOBO's out these. Like Supermicro E100; which comes in anything from ARM to Intel i7 as passive cooled full server only 3x Raspi size.