Raspberry Pi 5

Hardware
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So there’s a new Pi on the horizon:

Some preliminary benchmarks here

About twice the performance of the Pi 4, needs more cooling though.

Still relies on an SD card by default (even though the performance has been bumped to 104SDR, theoretically twice the bandwidth compared to the Pi4), but this is still going to be a bottleneck. That’s a little disappointing. It does have a PCIe 2.0 connector though, so an M.2 NVMe SSD could be connected to it without going over USB. It would need an adapter board though, as the physical connectors are different.

Still looks like a decent new SBC for HA and a possible competitor to a small NUC, especially for setups that need more processing power. Especially if fitted with an M.2 SSD.

4GB variant is $60, 8GB is going to be $80. At least if they can avoid the scalpers this time and actually produce enough of them to server consumers and not only businesses…

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Finally they reached 16nm in 2023 :rofl:

So probably still weaker and more expensive then a random old intel mini PC which actually is directly usable as it comes with case, storage, power supply etc… :point_down:

The Intel Celeron CPU N3350 found in the linked product btw. is from 2016 and used 14nm lithography already :bulb:

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Interesting, thanks for the update!

I wonder if they’ll actually be able to supply these.

I also can’t help but wonder why the need for more power and higher cost. The RPi’s whole “thing” was being a low-end, very cheap single board computer which could handle small tasks. My RPi 3 runs HA just fine. It sits in the low single-digit CPU utilization all the time. Why would I want to pay more just to drive that below 1-2%?

It looks to me like the plan is to price themselves into the NUC market, at which point they’ve lost their biggest selling point. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. Presumably used 3’s and 4’s will be cheap for a while, anyway.

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It will be interesting to see benchmarks for local speech recognition. Could still have a good Performance per Watt rating

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Yeah I mean it really depends on the target market. There will always be a natural progressive shift to higher performance. I’m still on a Pi3 and my CPU averages around 2%. But other uses may require more power, especially around video stream processing (cameras), speech processing, machine learning models, etc. The I/O speed can also very easily strangle your system to a point of almost halting it, if there are lots of writes (HA default database, for example).

I think their biggest selling point was always ‘tinkerability’ (GPIO headers) and the price point. They lost the latter with the component shortages over the last few years and their debatable business decisions to throw non-business consumers into a ditch. But this may be an opportunity to get back to their original audience. Let’s see.

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Just to compare some “performance/watt” between the RPi 4 and this $77 mini pc based on a N3350 :point_down:

Processor Intel Celeron N3350 Broadcom BCM2711
Market (main) Entry-level notebook Single-board computer
ISA x86-64 (64 bit) ARMv8-A (64-bit)
Microarchitecture Goldmont Cortex-A72
… … …
(Multi-core / watt performance) Performance / watt ratio 395 pts / W 128 pts / W

So a 2016 entry level CPU is more then 3 times the “performance/W” ratio. If the Raspberry 5 only delivers 100% more performance it is still the weaker device which cost more :man_shrugging:

Despite the Raspberry Pi 5 looks like to be priced like a Orange Pi 5 but the later actually offers more like double the cores, a M.2 and eMMC slot.

But as shown in the benchmarks some SBCs like the Orange Pi 5 that utilize a big.LITTLE design to provide more cores can outperform the Raspberry Pi 5 still in some areas.
Raspberry Pi 5 Benchmarks: Significantly Better Performance, Improved I/O Review - Phoronix

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Really tempted to get the RPI5 - but - piece of advice requested - hope you folks don’t see this as spam -

Given this background information - maybe too much -
I am still new to this but learning fast. Using an RPI4 w/8 Gig ram & Samsung T7 1TB SSD over USB3->USBC for boot. My automation has reached a point where I want to add video (have about 185 devices and ~300 automations) but have highly customized setup on Supervised with Debian 12, yiadiyaida etc. (CPU still around 10% most of the time and 30% memory usage). I’d prefer to use the same configuration so I don’t have to rewrite python daemons (which I have for transmissintg weather station data as well as turning cooling fans on and off depending upon CPU temperature - which I have never needed to use except in testing) and love Supervised - maybe becaue I am a dumb noob - but I understand that may be shortsighted. I want to add several cameras (not more than 10) but am holding back because I know that would blow the hardware out of the water. As a ‘purist’ have tried to avoid dongles such as zigbee and have a pretty robust network with strong coverage and static IP’s for everything. (FYI my setup is only reliable as I have it automatically reboot twice a week, because after about 9-15 days it always has the CPU go on vacation - near 0% CPU usage and temps as cool as a cucumber - but not running anything and nothing in the logs - evidently a weird issue and an ‘open secret’ problem known in the community with RPI…) So -

Question:
Ideally I would like to keep everything on the same piece of hardware (not necessarily what I have now) so I don’t need to worry about extra complexity of neworking connectivity to camera storage/feeds etc. - and I am still a dangerous bull in a china shop (noob) with docker/containers. As I can learn fast and have a decent budget - if I have to throw everything away and stand it all up on a CPU that won’t support Debian or AARCH64 I guess that isn’t the end of the world - but really want to keep HA - and the most flexible version possible - from what I understand, HA on a Windows OS under containers are not very reliable… What do you folks think I should do?

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Except that $77 PC is not $77 any more.

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How so? Just because that particular (N3350) device is sold out or because of inflation? :thinking:

Fun Fact: The now offered N4020 based mini PC even offers a better performance/buck ratio :astonished: (5.19 performance points per $ VS only 5.13 points per $ with the N3350) :bulb:

And still, the thing probably not only has double the performance to a RPI5 but it is most likely still cheaper compared to a RPI5 equivalent with storage, case, psu :see_no_evil:

Beside power management (still) often works better on x64 machines. Wasn’t it the RPI4 with that quite high idle consumption at almost 3W? :zap:

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Agreed, the performance in a given class of hardware should trend up. But this represents an upgrade to a different (and more expensive) class. Why? I think there’s still a niche at the lower end of the market. I don’t use HA for streaming video, security cameras or voice recognition.

I remember when the RPi was introduced. I was floored at the performance for the price. It was truly revolutionary. Now it’s not even competitive when you do the price/performance calculations in some of the above posts.

I hope so, but it’s not looking good at this point. Funny you should mention GPIO. Two major reasons why I chose HA was that it ran on an RPi, and that it had native GPIO support. I wasn’t pleased when the development team chose to abandon GPIO support and relegate it to a third-party add-on. And it always makes me uncomfortable to read posts suggesting the RPi platform should be abandoned.

At least until now, HA on a RPi was a perfect project. A very useful system which can be set up without a huge investment in hardware or a major commitment of time. I hope that is not coming to an end.

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I agree with the pricing issues. The price of a fully configured Pi has been bumping up to a nuc like pc for years.

But there will still be a market.

The most exciting upgrade was finally addition of hardware encryption support. For anyone needing to move large amounts of data in an encrypted world, the Pi was a snail.

HW encryption may be enough for us to at least look at the Pi again for our uses, but they are late to the party.

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Neither do I. And the older Pis will still be available. The 5 is just a new addition to the lineup targeting a slightly different use case. You can still buy a brand new Pi3 if you want (although prices are still nowhere near what used to be considered normal).

I would take the above calculations with a grain of salt (for example, ‘performance/W’ metrics make absolutely no sense for an application like HA, the power curves at idle to something like 20% CPU would be much more important). But I see what you mean and I tend to agree that the Raspberry is in a much worse position competition wise than what it used to be. The decision of the RPI foundation to pretty much stop selling to consumers during a couple of years did a lot of damage to the brand (possibly irreversible) and brought new competitors to the field. Let’s see if the Pi5 can change something here. It looks like a pretty decent platform for people who like to tinker with hardware and need some more power under the hood. The addition of the M.2 interface was a major step.

Eh. As long as HA is just a bunch of Python, it will run on any platform that supports the Python runtime engine. Maybe not HAOS, but Core and Container will.

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Was wondering if this means a new revision of the HA Yellow&Green will come out eventually?

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Green is not Pi based, so I doubt this has much impact.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the last Yellow ever has already been produced.

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The NUC market is soon gone, so the idea might not be that bad.

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You all need to look broader.
RPis is not only used for running HA and they are beating a NUC or any other PC in accessories.

I have a little project going where I want a RPi with an ePaper monitor connected to SPI, sensors for temperature, humidity and light and a soundcard for warning/messages.
This should easily be run on a RPi3, but if I want to add voice Assistant with wake word, then I would maybe need a RPi4 or better and if I want to play music on that project too with echo cancellation, beamforming and other sound features on the voice Assistant, then a RPi5 might be a good choice.

This project would not be so essily possible on a PC

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Wondering about a CM5. Compute Module 5.
Might it be pin compatible?

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Highly unlikely.
The RPi5 have new features, like a PCIe port, which would require CPU connections.

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Depends on how many free pins were on the CM4 connector. My guess is there are enough. CM4 has 2 100 pin connectors.

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I’m seeing a lot of mention of performance per currency unit spent. But at what cost would this be? I think, for an always-on device, the amount of energy consumed while idle is an important factor as well.

I’ve seen people use an old small form factor PC for home automation, thinking they were saving some money, instead of going with something new, like an RPI4, because “more performance”. This old small form factor PC was using 50 Watt idle, instead of 3 for a more than adequate RPi. So this device added over 123 Euros to their utility bill each year. (Assuming 30 cents a kWh.)

Saving some money in fact ending this person up with spending money within a year. Each watt of 24/7 additional power consumption adds about 2,6 euros or dollar to your yearly bill when assuming a 0,30 cent price for electricity. Do not underestimate how quickly this adds up.

Also, who needs a ton of performance for Home Assistant in most cases. I’ve been running HA on an RPi 4, 4GB with a 32 GB SD card without issue. (I have daily backups and 2 spare SD cards at the ready in case an SD card fails on me.)

Also the pricepoint mentioned of some Nuc PCs. 77 dollar. They are listen for over over a 100 nowadays. And then you also need to add a bunch of peripherals to make it all integrate, just like with an RPi. And if you go with an RPi 5 4 GB, a case, a power supply, and a Raspbee 2 board for Zigbee, I think you end up with a neat package, nothing much sticking out out it, that works for many use cases. And to be honest, an RPi4 is still more than capable enough right now. (Still going to upgrade to an RPi 5 or a Yellow with a CM 5 once available, provided the power consumption is in the same range.)

(I love the Home Assistant Green and Yellow btw. Not the cheapest options, but they get first party support and for a device that’s central to your home, that is a big argument for these devices.)

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