Small Form Factor New Raspberry Pi 5

Hmm - I think an RP2040/RP1-based "Pico 2" would be very interesting.

 

There are cheaper SBCs, and there are more powerful SBCs. But to my knowledge, there is no other SBC solution that offers everything the Raspberry Pi can: hardware & software support, wide range of add-on compatibility, highly capable and versatile general purpose compute, and relatively low cost. IMO the only other SBCs that come close to the Pi in terms of level of support are x86 SBCs. But that gets a bit murky when you look at bootloaders and the ability to install whatever OS you want, and completely fails on price.

But no, supply chain issues have not helped. As far as I know though, that’s generally not an issue any more.

Don’t forget the issues with brownouts on the very first iteration of the board. They assumed strict adherence to USB voltage standards across the industry, when in fact most USB power supplies… just… didn’t… do that. Whether it was resistive losses in poor-quality cables or poorly-designed power circuits sagging under load, the assumed minimum of 4.75v was not always delivered to the board via MicroUSB. Leading to brownouts of USB devices or even complete shutdown of the board.

Admittedly that wasn’t technically the fault of the RPi itself, but it was certainly naïve hardware design. It could have maybe been avoided, but very early on the goals were tiny in comparison to where they are now. The original plan was to build 10,000 of them and selling every single unit would have been considered a success. Then the hype grew beyond any of their wildest expectations.

 

Good god, I never thought I’d be suddenly overwhelmed with nostalgia for the era when motherboards still had northbridges and southbridges…

…Says the guy who has a period-accurate late 90s/early 2000s PC (complete with CRT monitor) and one of their first computers from 34 years ago sat on a shelf… And not just “the same model which I bought later on down the line”, the same actual computer I got for Christmas in 1989…

 

Oof, 3Dfx Voodoo, very nice - they’re harder to get hold of than hen’s teeth these days.

I can’t remember the exact spec of my retro build, but I know the CPU is somewhere around 1GHz and it has a GeForce3 MX. I am indeed using an IDE-to-CF adapter, and it’s got working CDROM, DVD-RW, and floppy drives. More like a Win2000 machine than a Win98/95 or DOS machine, I’d say. At least for me anyway - I was one of those weirdos who actually ran Win2000 as a daily driver and played games on it. Largely because I had a dual CPU system at the time: two P3 800MHz chips overclocked to 966MHz on an Abit VP6 (never could quite break that 1GHz barrier, sadly). Damn, I wish I’d kept that PC, it was an absolute beast in its day… I even had a capture card so I could hook up my PlayStation to my monitor…

 

I largely missed the DOS era, it was never really my thing... There were still brilliant DOS games around when I started getting into "proper" PCs, but most of the time you could run them from within Windows. Or you'd reboot to a DOS prompt... or use a boot floppy... We didn't get a "proper" x86 PC until 1996, right when Win95 was all the rage - up until that point I was still using my Atari STe.

These days I can just use the ao486 core on my MiSTer if I ever want "proper DOS".

 

Amber CRT, nice…

Anyhoo, I’m gonna stop dragging us off topic now…

 

So whats the bottom line here - are they going to release full datasheet/TRM eventually or is this will be same as with current braodcom stuff? From Uptons PR: "While we are looking at exposing more of the features of RP1, both in software and with further documentation, that’s going to be something you might see a little later on." does not fill me with confindence.
At least most of the peripherals are license from Synopsys, so can get documentation from them.

Visual block is quite interesting, triple video dac and all that.

 

Feels like theres a bit of bulls****** going around - most of what is released is already documented in rp2040 datasheet in more deph (most peripherals are based on same ip, stuff like PIO is completly missing). Are they saying that they spent 25M$ on custom asic and still dont know what documentation they can disclose or even have one? That should have been sorted in IP selection phase.
And why tf releasing documentation is dependant on exposing it to userspace?

Or they could pull off Broadcom2 and require NDA and an order of 10k before they give it to you.

Could also connect couple more over USB, SPI.

 

I'm still using a pi3 (on librelec) as my main media streamer (mostly downloaded stuff from a usb3 HDD), but the pi3 can't play h.265 (only h.264). So I either need to move to a newer pi or some sort of android box.... thoughts?

 

Depends on your requirements.

If it's only ever going to be local media then a Pi will do fine. If you also want access to streaming services (Netflix, Prime Video, iPlayer, Disney+, etc) then get a Fire Stick.

I generally wouldn't recommend the cheapo generic Android TV boxes that are splashed all over AliExpress and the like. There's no guarantee that you'll have access to app stores or streaming media services - even if you don't need those, there's absolutely no guarantee that malware hasn't made its way into the OS (and there is plenty of evidence of this happening).

 

I use a fire stick for streaming service at the moment, nice and simple - but there's no usb slot for local media, hence the pi.