The verdict on whether a Raspberry Pi 5 was going to drop this year bounced between yes and no until it was officially announced that it would not only drop this year but would drop in October. Which just so happens to be this month. The announcement came out a few days ago.
This makes for a positive announcement since it wasn’t until recently that consumers could reliably get their hands on a Raspberry Pi 4 at its normal pricing. Inventory has also been up and down at certain retailers, but has improved greatly over the last few months.
Now, consumers will have a chance to get their hands on the more powerful model this month (assuming stock is plentiful enough). Bringing with it a number of new and enhanced features, such as a new 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, a VideoCore VII GPU (800MHz), and number of improvements to what you can attach to it.
Here is a full list of highlights from Raspberry Pi Foundation:
- 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU
- VideoCore VII GPU, supporting OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.2
- Dual 4Kp60 HDMI display output
- 4Kp60 decoder
- Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi
- Bluetooth 5.0 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
- High-speed microSD card interface with SDR104 mode support
- 2 × USB 3.0 ports, supporting simultaneous 5Gbps operation
- 2 × USB 2.0 ports
- Gigabit Ethernet, with PoE+ support (requires separate PoE+ HAT, coming soon)
- 2 × 4-lane MIPI camera/display transceivers
- PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for fast peripherals
- Raspberry Pi standard 40-pin GPIO header
- Real-time clock
- Power button
The PCIe 2.0 x1 interface being a huge addon (M.2 HAT required). As is the Bluetooth 5.0 with BLE for those looking to go wireless with sound or peripherals.
It will be available sometime this month in two different options. Allowing you to pick between 4GB RAM ($60) and 8GB RAM ($80). The price has gone up just a little, but so has everything else in the world. So it makes since that they had to adjust for this.
