It's interesting that the PCIe lane can be driven at PCIe 3.0 speeds. That goes a long way to helping to make up for the fact that it's just one lane. Having used various PCIe cards on a RockPro64, it's nice to see more options.
I'm a little surprised that UEFI isn't available at launch, but here's to hoping that won't take too long.
Good stuff, and I'm happy to see the progress. I just wish the company hadn't gone off the deep end.
Geerling reviews that device here[2] and compares it to the RPi 4 back in February.
I was excited about the Pi 5 yesterday. And now more information has just left me uncertain. I think I need even more information.
Apparently there will be an M.2 NVMe hat in early 2024[3] so I guess that has to be factored into the price calculations for an RPi5.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBtOEmUqASQ&t=566s
[2] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/rock-5-b-not-raspberr...
[3] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/answering-some-questi...
I've been booting a couple of Pi 4s from USB SSDs for a while, in order to avoid relying on SD cards, but I'm not really familiar with what all of the implications of this are.
For spinning rust, two fast (220 MB/sec) drives don't max out the single USB 3 channel on a Raspberry Pi 4. I have one colocated with two software mirrored 8 TB drives, with UASP, and I can get the full 220 MB/sec per drive at the same time with that setup.
I think jeff did this testing on a pre-release firmware, so that and other features may be coming.
Sending Pi 5s to people who're going to review them before the release makes sense, but of course it'd have been nice if they sent them to people who contribute important pieces of the ecosystem, too.
