As someone who thought they were getting away with something finding Pi4's in stock at a normal price... welllll shit.
For a general purpose computer though, the 5 is getting to the point where it is competitive for a lot of use cases where the 4 was a bit of a struggle. It sounds like I could definitely consider using a 5 as a mini-workstation for web browsing, some light dev work and the like, in those cases where the 4 felt a little clunky.
It's 12W under high load, but at equivalent load (in terms of output performance) to a 4B draws less power.
A Pi4 is still a perfectly fine microcomputer.
But the R.Pi 4x series is peak R.Pi for me. In the last couple of years, NUC-class SFF devices with Intel-based chipsets have appeared [1] and they offer a much better performance profile (speed, power consumption) than the R.Pi 5. Some of these devices offer dual gigabit Ethernet.
[1] Liliputing is one site that I follow for related information.
I have a few NUC-style very small form factor Intel machines around too, of course, but there are a lot of good options out there and ARM shouldn't be discounted.
Not that I don't have an Orange Pi 5 for other uses, but that's gathering dust in a drawer because I'm waiting for good GPU drivers. The Raspberry Pi 5 seems like it'll have Vulkan 1.2 out of the box. I'm still waiting for Panfrost's new PanCSF drivers for the RK3588 Malis.
A 30$ Le Potato is still more than the 25$ Raspberry Pi 3A+. Which I like for it's smaller size. A single USB port isn't too big a deal if you get a CSI Pi Camera for monitoring instead of USB, or use the GPIO for serial.
I see a lot of people who overspent on RPi4's, even, when they just could've used something with an H616 or whatever on it.
I would love to see an RK3588S board for < $50, because the chip is incredible in terms of efficiency and feature set... but it's just so expensive still.
I've had bad luck with the Pi 4 with respect to video decoding. 4k HEVC decoding is an advertised feature of the Pi 4, but it chokes on anything with moderate bitrates in my experience. I'd like my next board to support HDR and HEVC so reliably that I never have to think about it, and I'm not sure if that's going to be the Pi 5 or not.
My contention is for things that actually need relatively-modern performance (taking into account that the RK3588 is still a little old, albeit Very Fresh for a SBC), I think that $20 is probably worth it for most of them.
The real challenge is though that for most people, there's a huge market of secondary/resold business mini-pcs. These systems offer exceptional value. They're bulkier & idle close to 10w often, but if you're not doing battery powered or mobile robotics it's almost always a great trade-off.
My old Acer Chromebox units were even smaller and idled around 4w, and had two pretty beefy cores (alebit with low clock and small caches) and gobs of io. 6 USB3 ports, which it could easily saturate & barely break a sweat. Internal sata and mini-pcie wifi. Incredibly great value, and I was picking them up for under $100 years ago. Stuck 2*16gb ram in em. Amazing value.
If you need gpio, there are really really cheap USB based addon peripherals that offer whatever you might want and more.
It bothers me a lot how many people seem to support a market for junky piddling slow & limited celerons. The chips you cite have barely changed in almost a decade & were low end to start. I used a Chuwi 12.3 laptop with n3450 for a while & it was quite survivable sure. But there's so much more value going to resale markets or spending a little more & buying a Lenovo business 1L mini PC when it goes on sale. I wish Intel wasn't able to get away with selling such bad performance for so long.
Thankfully the new Alder Lake N replacement is worlds better. It's a great chip, and we can buy units at reasonable prices. I wish AMD competed here too but they have remained far up market.
Alder Lake stuff is showing up now, and that's pretty great. It is not, however, particularly fast hardware, and the GPUs are still really pokey.
You heard wrong, then.
"For normal usage of your Raspberry Pi, adding cooling is entirely optional. The idle performance of a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Raspberry Pi 5 is about the same, and under typical loads Raspberry Pi 5 will run cooler than a similarly loaded Raspberry Pi 4."
"even when fully throttled, a Raspberry Pi 5 is still going to run faster than a Raspberry Pi 4!"
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/heating-and-cooling-raspber...
A Pi 5 has a higher performance ceiling than the Pi 4 when passively cooled, and an even higher one with active cooling. The Pi 5 does not need cooling for most tasks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35_5wRKi_TI&t=12m20s
With a big passive cooler, temperatures were only marginally higher than with the stock cooler. (58.7 vs. 60.9℃)
Pi 4s require cooling for many workloads (they run notoriously hot).
You're more likely to run into the needs-cooling envelope of a Pi 4.
I'm sure those who put a premium on thermals or quietness will be able to run RPi5 with passive cooling if they really want to. The RPi4 already suffered from thermal issues and that didn't pose a major problem. Anyone could simply drop by Amazon and pick one of the many passive cooling cases without any issue.
But for anything involving raw GPIO, you know, the reason you might want a true embedded board instead of a commodity PC, the pi5 has completely changed the architecture. The GPIO pins used to come straight off the BCM CPU with direct register access, now they're peripherals of the RP1 southbridge IC which is connected over PCIe.
Chief in my mind is the rpitx/pifm projects, which (ab)use the DMA pipeline to cram baseband-rate samples into the PWM registers and make a GPIO pin oscillate at radio frequencies. Connect a (bandpass filter, please! and a) piece of wire, and voila, the board becomes a radio transmitter.
This simply won't work on the pi5 without a complete rewrite of the core. Someone will have to figure out if the RP1 even offers similar capability, figure out if PCIe packet jitter will screw it up or if there's some buffering possible in the RP1, and rearchitect the whole project around it.
However, neither of those projects has seen much activity lately. In other words, it ain't likely to happen. Just keep using 3's and 4's for this.
For some stuff, pifmrds for instance, stereo processing really chews through CPU, and precludes running a station-automation package on the same iron. It would be really nice to have a faster CPU wrapped around the same transmit capability, but that's not what the pi5 is. If someone builds a station-in-a-box around this, it'll have a pi5 for the front-end but a pi4 as the actual exciter.
I’m doing the same with Proxmox Backup Server, Proxmox itself runs on a more powerful thin client ;)