Excellent news !
Yeah well. Third most installed OS in this case translates to around 6%. The top two make almost 80%. Still, NC should absolutely have been invited into the beta program.
1 Like
Waiting patiently to upgrade from RPI3 with the 1GB ram constantly over 85% of use. 🥲
we are happy to report that Compute Module 4 has become more widely available again, as seen on rpilocator.
Only in Europe, unfortunately. Very limited in the US, not seen in Canada at all since May.
2 Likes
Honestly, the 5 looks nice but I somehow doubt that the problems of the 4 were fixed. Using the same dual purpose wifi chip, you probably still can’t use ble mouse and keyboard at the same time.
I wonder if the new 5 has support for hardware en-/decoding of encryption (e.g. for decent ssh/sftp support).
1 Like
If someone would like to join the beta program, just go here:
The Alpha forum (which is probably what people are actually asking about), is a separate forum that a small number of people (currently about 20) have been invited to. We send them hardware early under NDA so that we can get early feedback. Some of the image maintainers are on that list (Ubuntu, OSMC for example) but mostly because we have had a long-term relationship with those people. To get into the alpha forum as a random user, you’d need to be known on the Raspberry Pi forums, join the beta forum, and help out with testing software releases etc. In fact, around 20 of the beta forum members have now been sent Pi 5 units to thank them for (unknowingly) helping to develop the Bookworm image for Pi 5.
Gordon Hollingworth (CTO-Software at Raspberry Pi)
11 Likes
Does it? The Orange Pi 5 (RK3588) is available since around a year and available benchmarks look like this “old” SBC is not only offer more performance than the not (yet) available Raspberry Pi 5 but is specially (much) more efficient 
Yes, for a RPi it looks nice. But it does not look like a significant improvement.
Compared to other devices it remains what it was before: cheap, simple and low(ish) power consumption.
I think the real question is how Home Assistant/Nabu Casa can get on that Alpha list, so they can start preparing to get HAOS ready for the new hardware as soon as possible (preferably at launch)
1 Like
Why are you waiting patiently? You realize 4 comes after 3 and before 5, right? The pi4 was released YEARS ago. Other than during covid, they have been widely available and are available right now.
I always skip a model, I do that with all kind of gear.
It improves my patience skill and makes me feel like a less dumb consumer.
6 Likes
Ya, that makes a lot of sense… kinda like wiping before you poo. You do realize there are dozens of really good projects you can use these for, right? HA is just one thing you can do with one and you can arguably never have to many rpi laying around.
O K… Thanks for your input.
As stated before in a quote it looks like the raspberry pi trading ltd rushed indeed releasing this board. Every day passing this 16nm lithography design (introduced 2016 - so 7 years old) it’s collecting dust. 
As a side note a RK3588(S) comes with a NPU integrated with 6 TOPS (50% more than a coral NPU) 
The Orange Pi 5 Plus even features 2xPCIe and 2.5G LAN 
The Price for a (available) Orange Pi 5 VS a (not available) Raspberry Pi 5 looks like to be in the same ball park while the later offers much less (CPU,GPU,NPU,Storage) 
And the “new” VideoCore 7 GPU from the Raspberry Pi 5 looks like a joke based on the limited information available
It looks like to have 12 (
) times lower performance than the Mali G610 found in the two year older RK3588 based SBC’s like the Orange Pi 5 
| Graphics card | ARM Mali-G610 MP4 | Broadcom VideoCore VII | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Market (main) | Desktop | Desktop | ||||||
| Release date | Q2 2021 | Q3 2023 | ||||||
| Performance FP32 (float) | 610.6 GFLOPS | 51.2 GFLOPS |
Looks like the Raspberry 5 is easy 2 years late for the show 
Maybe they are now the Apple of SoCs 
And this is completely irrelevant. HA does not run on the GPU.
2 Likes
As is the 6 TOPS NPU for HA at this very moment - and now comes the but (not butt 
) HA supports various add-ons which can make use of (supported) GPU’s and NPU’s to (greatly) lower CPU usage
For example my HaOS machine also runs frigate which does support off-loading to compatible GPU/VPU and NPU/TPU 
I also expect that HA actually utilizes GPU/VPU accelerators already today for stuff like video de/transcoding (hwaccel with ffmpeg) for showing cameras on lovelace for example 
There’s the x86 platform for that, with some real dedicated GPU / TPU power, rather than some half baked SBC.
Might need to correct myself here. Looks like 14nm lithography was already around since 2014 actually. 
So the new Raspberry Pi 5 looks like it uses rather a 10 year old process node in it’s ‘new’ design 
Shipping devices
In 2013, SK Hynix began mass-production of 16 nm NAND flash,[23] TSMC began 16 nm FinFET production,[24] and Samsung began 10 nm class NAND flash production.[25]
Yeah, but having some 3rd party boards now, it’s a real pain with the OS. You only get either a crusty old Ubuntu version or you have to manage with unsupported Arabian build. Not sure someone at Nabula Casa wants to deal with that and support that… Even I am thinking of just throwing them out, just for that reason…
What people love about Pi’s isn’t the performance, you could just get a NUC-alike for that, but that just everyone supports Pis and they always get updates.
2 Likes
Due diligence is obligatory before buying a “random SBC” - other than x86/64 devices they don’t share a common (software) base to build on
That said my (H3) Orange Pi’s had mainline support before the raspberries back in the days
If it’s about Armbian the mentioned RK3588 based Orange Pi 5 / 5B / 5 Plus are actually one out of seven devices with “platinum support”
If you taking about Nabu Casa here they actually just recently delivered HaOS for a RK3566 device (Home Assistant 
) and it is probably (much) easier for the team to port HaOS to a RK3588 with (almost?) complete mainline support than for the new Raspberry Pi 5 with BCM2712 that doesn’t have any mainline support by the looks of it (this very moment in time)