Raspberry Pi 5: Early benchmarks confirm big performance gains for new single-board computer

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released the Raspberry Pi 5, over four years after introducing the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. While the Raspberry Pi Foundation will not begin shipping until next month, the likes of Phoronix have already benchmarked the new single-board computer (SBC).

For reference, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has based the Raspberry Pi 5 around the Boardcom BCM2712, a chipset with four ARM Cortex-A76 CPU cores clocked at 2.4 GHz and a VideoCore VII GPU running at 800 MHz. Additionally, the Raspberry Pi 5 comes with a choice of 4 GB or 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM initially, with 1 GB and 2 GB variants available at a later date. Moreover, the Raspberry Foundation claims that the Raspberry Pi 5 contains the following advantages over its predecessor:

• 4-lane MIPI interfaces
• 2x MicroSD card performance
• Dedicated UART connector
• HDR support
• PCIe 2.0 x1 FPC
• Raspberry Pi RP1 Southbridge
• Real-time clock
• Power button
• USB Power Delivery support

According to Phoronix's findings, the Raspberry Pi 5 lives up to its billing with vastly improved performance in all workloads compared to the Raspberry Pi 4. The website notes that this is achieved in part thanks to the first-party active cooler, which the Foundation has shipped with review units. Also, the Orange Pi 5 proves more powerful in certain benchmarks thanks to its octa-core chipset.

The Raspberry Pi 5 starts at US$60 in the US before taxes, US$5 more than its predecessor. Alternatively, the Raspberry Pi Foundation will sell the 8 GB of RAM variant for US$80. While the Foundation has already opened pre-orders, it will not begin shipping Raspberry Pi 5 units at the end of October.

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