It was at the beginning of the year when Eben Upton, CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, was talking about his famous SBCs. So, he mainly talked about the restoration of stock of the Raspberry Pi 4 which came, in its 8 GB model, to cost 200 euros. I also talk about the Raspberry Pi 5 in passing, to say that it could arrive next year, but, as it should be?
If you’re even a bit of a techie, you’ve heard of the Raspberry Pi. These SBC (Single Board Computer) have become very popular due to their reasonable price and great power. A popularity that has caused imitators to proliferate.
The COVID pandemic has had a strong impact on these pocket computers. For months the stock has been very low and prices have doubled. Luckily, it seems that the stock is rising and the price is normalizing.
What do we expect from the Raspberry Pi 5?
Well, first, a date. Theoretically it should have been released last year. Then rumors arose that it would come out this year and at the beginning of the year there was already talk of 2024, at the earliest. It is necessary, since the Raspberry Pi 4 has become somewhat obsolete and there are superior models on the market.
The first big challenge for the Pi 5 is to improve the power of the processor. Something quite viable would be to use a processor ARM architecture with 4 power cores that reach 2 GHz and are complemented by 2 efficiency cores. It would be a good combination that would allow a big jump in performance.
One of the critical points is the amount of RAM. It makes no sense to currently launch models with 1 GB and 2 GB of RAM. Most likely, the basic model will have 4 GB of RAM, we will see an intermediate model with 8 GB and a top model of 16 GB. At least, this is what we hope and desire, to be able to use it as a personal computer.
You shouldn’t give up the card reader, but you should add a M.2 socket for SSD. The integration of this connector in the Raspberry Pi is beginning to be necessary, especially due to the price of these storage units. Even if it is only PCIe 3.0, it will give much better performance than connecting a SATA SSD via USB, as many have been doing.
Maybe this is more complicated, but how nice it would be to have a USB-C with Alt Mode (DisplayPort compatible). This would open up the possibilities of using this SBC in a brutal way.
Something that would also be interesting is that it will support WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2. The most normal thing is that it will already support these standards in the next version.
But, something like this already exists
The interesting thing about all this is that we have the Orange Pi 5 that meets practically everything indicated. This board has an 8-core ARM architecture processor and 16 GB of RAM. It also includes an M.2 SSD socket to install a 2230 format storage unit. It also integrates a USB-C port, although without Alt Mode support.
All this is the Orange Pi 5 16 GB that costs 137 euros, practically the same as the Raspberry Pi 4. An update to the best-known SBC board in the world is necessary, without a doubt.
