Raspberry Pi 5 Arrives in October, Starts at $60

It took over four years thanks to pandemic-era supply issues, but the Raspberry Foundation is finally launching a new flagship credit card-sized board computer, the Raspberry Pi 5.

“Today, we’re delighted to announce the launch of Raspberry Pi 5, coming at the end of October,” Eben Upton writes in what I assume to be an understatement in the announcement post. “Priced at $60 for the 4 GB variant, and $80 for its 8 GB sibling (plus your local taxes), virtually every aspect of the platform has been upgraded, delivering a no-compromises user experience. Raspberry Pi 5 comes with new features, it’s over twice as fast as its predecessor, and it’s the first Raspberry Pi computer to feature silicon designed in‑house here in Cambridge, UK.”

Woo-hoo!

The Raspberry Pi 5 is powered by a 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 CPU with a 2.4 GHz clock speed and a VideoCore VII GPU that supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2, dual 4K displays at 60 FPS via its 4Kp60 HEVC decoder. It has dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5, unfortunately), Bluetooth 5.0 with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Gigabit Ethernet with PoE+ support (a required and separate PoE+ HAT is coming soon) for connectivity. For expansion, it offers a PCIe 2.0 x1 interface, a standard Raspberry Pi 40-pin GPIO header, two USB 3.0 (5 Gbps) ports, two USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) ports, and a high-speed microSD card slot with SDR104 mode support. And there are also two 4-lane MIPI camera/display transceivers, and the device uses a 15-watt USB-C port for power.

As you may recall, Raspberry Pi launched this board PC’s predecessor, the Raspberry Pi 4, in June 2019, and it first offered an 8 GB variant in May 2020, right at the start of the pandemic, and then the Raspberry Pi 400, which was essentially a 4 GB Raspberry Pi 4 inside of a keyboard case similar to the Commodore computers of the 1980s that November. However, the firm ran into supply chain issues that greatly restricted its ability to ship products, and in late 2022, Upton apologized to fans and revealed that the Raspberry Foundation would be unable to release its long-planned Raspberry Pi 5 upgrade in 2023. And all that makes this release such a wonderful surprise.

“We’re incredibly grateful to the community of makers and hackers who make Raspberry Pi what it is,” Upton notes. “You’ve been extraordinarily patient throughout the supply chain issues that have made our work so challenging over the last couple of years. We’d like to thank you: We’re going to ringfence all of the Raspberry Pi 5s we sell until at least the end of the year for single-unit sales to individuals, so you get the first bite of the cherry.”

In addition to the Raspberry Pi 5, the Foundation will also release a new case at $10 that includes an integrated CFM fan with fluid dynamic bearings, a separate active cooler for $5, a 27-watt power supply and USB-C cable for $12, and various other peripherals. And it will be accompanied by the release of a new Raspberry Pi OS, which is based on Debian Linux.

You can learn more about the Raspberry Pi 5 on the Raspberry Pi website.