Four years after the Raspberry Pi 4 shipped, today the Raspberry Pi 5 is launching with a much improved SoC leading to significant performance gains.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is designed to deliver a 2~3x performance improvement over the Raspberry Pi 4. The Raspberry Pi 5 features a quad-core Cortex-A76 processor that clocks up to 2.4GHz, compared to the four Cortex-A72 cores found in the Raspberry Pi 4 that only clocked up to 1.8GHz. The graphics are also much-improved with now having an 800MHz VideoCore VII graphics processor over the VideoCore VI graphics with the Raspberry Pi 4. The Raspberry Pi 5 is capable of driving two 4K @ 60Hz displays and features 4K @ 60 HEVC decode hardware capabilities.
Also interesting with the Raspberry Pi 5 is that it features in-house silicon in the form of the RP1 “southbridge” used for much of the board’s I/O capabilities. This southbridge should yield faster USB I/O along with other I/O bandwidth upgrades like a doubling of the peak SD card performance. The Raspberry Pi 5 also features a single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface for improved connectivity.
I think that the rpi4 came out before the supply chain issue caused by Covid.
Before that, it was easy to get a Rpi. It was an issue getting any kind of electronic parts for any kind of project. You had to secure your supply for your production first before starting a project. It was never seen before.
They admitted to supplying hundreds of thousands a month to bulk customers over the last 2 years while none made their way to consumer resellers.
My issue with their distribution methods is that they prioritized business customers during that time. They still produced RPis, but preferentially sent them to companies who use them in their products. This is completely removed from their original mission.
