Raspberry Pi CM5 is a faster, drop-in upgrade
jeffgeerling.com
jeffgeerling.com
Though I have to laugh at the "good news everyone, it's the same price!" followed immediately by "...for the 8GB version only, everything else costs more." Classic Pi Foundation pricing gymnastics. At least we're not dealing with scalpers asking $200 for a CM4 anymore.
The silkscreen specs on top is such a simple but brilliant addition. No more squinting at tiny chips trying to figure out which module is which in your parts drawer.
It actually can! .... if you also plug in a GPU. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/amd-radeon-pro-w7700-...
To be fair, theyve dropped the 1GB model, so do you want to compare old and new lowest specs?
I don't know about relative sales figures, I infer that 8GB is expected to be the default going forward.
The only issue of course is some whilst sharing the same formfactor and connector aren't always compatible with the same hardware.
If I recall correctly the Radxa CM3's for example are fully compatible.
If you want cheaper, yes there are other options. If you want something where a mainline kernel will work, and has a community, Pis are a much better choice.
On any x86 UEFI system I tried i never had any issues at all, but Pi's I remember as a huge PITA...
Or is this just a general ARM issue ?
I understand that this is the case. IBM did the PC world a solid by not encumbering the original H/W. That provided a basis for a platform that could be copied and provide a "standard" that others could leverage, including copying and reverse engineering the BIOS that launched the OS. That provided the foundation of the PC explosion. They tried to reverse their "mistake" with the Microchannel Architecture and that saw limited success (AKA failed.)
IBM was also part of a consortium that tried to develop a common platform for the Power architecture. I'm not sure if any of that survives in their current offerings but it did not take anything away from the Intel (Windows) market and except for Apple, the Power PC was nowhere to be seen.
ARM processors have proliferated in the hand held (phone, tablet) market where volumes are sufficient for the manufacturers to provide their own solution to bootstrapping the OS. There are some efforts to agree on a common boot architecture (Yocto, UEFI and probably others) and I'm not familiar with them, but I hope one succeeds so we can easily load a variety of OSs on our devices.
Incidentally... The GPU in the Raspberry Pi performs the initial stages of the boot process. Weird. I think that Pi 4/5 generations are moving away from that but I'm not familiar with the detains. As near as I can tell, they've preserved the S/W structure required for the GPU to perform this function.
For some definition of a "mainline kernel." My preferred Linux distro is Debian, I still can't run a Pi 5 on Debian over a year following release. (I don't know if this is for lack of Pi engineers not pushing stuff upstream or Debian/kernel devs not being receptive to PRs, but I suppose the answer is somewhere in between.)
I do run Debian on Pi 4B/CM4 and others. At present I'm working on getting 1-wire with a DS18B20 working on a Pi Zero W and it has not been easy, but that might be me.
I was truly excited to see the CM4 released because it provided a PCIe slot and which can support a proper storage interface on a Pi. I don't see a compelling feature on the CM5 so I'm not going to jump on one just yet. I'll probably get one at some point.
I do agree that the Raspberry Pi community provides reasonable support. I have, however, found the Reddit community occasionally toxic and have had questions on the official Pi forum removed w/out explanation. (I asked why the Imager did not offer the most recent OS releases in the menu, requiring that I manually download them.)
...but I bet you can port Raspberry's patches to a vanilla kernel tree relatively easily. Good luck with it with other providers.
I used OrangePi and Radxa. Radxa rock was a huge disappointment in that regard.
However, the support is "barely there". It's running standard Debian stable with a pinned Kernel from OrangePi guys, and the Kernel tree is open, but I don't know whether I'll be able to compile a 6.x kernel by lifting their patches and correctly applying them to a mainline kernel.
Then I don't know which drivers are closed source and how they'll play with each other.
On the other hand, Raspian works really well. Plus with a good A2 card, you really don't feel any latency in day to day use of the system anymore.
P.S.: I run both of them as home servers at different locations, so I can "continuously review" them day to day.
However, for many of the same reasons a 3k USD PLC makes sense in many low volume long-tale market applications (i.e. pre-certified and stamped hardware.)
Best of luck, =3
I have seen 3 or 4 products with these pi+Debian SoMs running network services etc. Getting them to be reliable is a different set of issues with dozens of edge cases, but its the same with every other vendor. Best regards =3
Recall the chip shortages... =3
If you are producing less than 1k pcs a month, than it certainly makes sense for smaller design runs. That being said, it is probably safer to eat the cost on the standard 0.1" ribbon cable header form-factor if you plan to run the line for a few years. The compute-modules have a tendency to change, and the micro-contact headers could be a failure point in some situations. Also, hardening the Pi design to be more reliable takes extensive testing, and experience.
Compared to other SoM manufacturers the Raspberry Pi foundation has a good reputation in both the open source community, and commercial roles. The pi4/5 FCC modular pre-compliance also saves around 11k USD when you go for lab testing. Also, pushing pi SoM production volumes higher means lower unit costs for everyone, and a double win is always nice.
If you don't need the gpio, than a mini PC form factor may offer more value.
There is also the Kria KR260 kits around, but it will not offer anywhere near the software/kernel ecosystem support of the pi community.
Best of luck, =3
If you plan on using it for small series of <10k/a I wouldn't worry too much
We also had to violate the Design for Manufacturability guidelines to adapt to the shortages and part skelpers hitting JIT lines. Even today, we incur a questionable 12 USD labor cost on every product to ensure a generic carrier PCB drop-in population option is always available (0.1" pins 1980's style).
Training slide deck: "Rule #21: No unicorn parts, and no excuses"
We dodged the CM4 choice luckily due to my concerns, but still were tagged by a proprietary missing RF module needed for legacy system interoperability. The vendors lied about inventory levels, and kept the order tied up for years before the spools arrived.
Best of luck, =)
http://www.youtube.com/@PhilsLab
It has some high speed stuff with ddr memory, fpga’s gigabit Ethernet and usb3 too so I’m pretty sure you could use the same concepts to build a board with a microprocessor on it. Proper grounding, emi, impedance control and length matching are well explained. I think he has some more advanced courses via his website too.
Additionally, this was an ah-ha moment video for me: https://www.youtube.com/live/ySuUZEjARPY?feature=shared
It's purpose-built for that, and they even have a rackmount chassis for it, though you could design your own too. Power for the drives requires a separate power supply though.
The other option right now is the Radxa Taco (https://radxa.com/products/io-board/taco/), but availability has been scarce. I've ordered one and will hopefully test it again soon, with the CM5!
(That is, if you're wanting to go down the Pi NAS route—there are certainly other options out there!)
For some reason I thought that Radxa is about to deprecate the Taco but I might be mistaken.
The one issue I found that without a heat-sink, fan and any drives just idling on a 12V supply the board got really hot. So I have my questions about the efficiency of the board. I've been thinking about testing the power usage of it so maybe a good time to follow through on it.
Which one are you using right now? There's some brands out there that are considered really bad by the community.
https://www.amazon.de/ICY-BOX-Externes-Festplatten-Aluminium...
https://www.amazon.de/ICY-BOX-Externes-Festplatten-Aluminium...
I'm using mine as an OpenWRT router with a dual 10 Gbe ethernet card in the PCIe slot ever since I got 10 Gbit internet at home and consumer 10 Gbit routers are expensive and leave a bit to be desired
Because that wouldn't be a faster, drop-in upgrade, right?
> 23 seconds until ssh login
Well ok, technically correct, but I expected faster when I read that.
The Raspberry Pi Zero for $5 was never widely available. I'd love to see something in that price range that is actually available to buy. Hopefully also with low power requirements like the original Pi Zero.
I suspect they sold the original either at a loss and/or just to get rid of excess inventory of that original Broadcom SoC - which is also why it was a hard-to-get limited run.
As far as I can tell, there's no custom "firmware" to speak of, it's a patched Linux kernel running a kernelmode audio synthesis engine and a usermode app for the UI
https://www.reddit.com/r/ableton/comments/1fzd9ln/move_is_a_...
[1] Why do laptops have so little RAM? (2015):
It's currently running at my parents' place as a VPN server to let them access their smart home and cameras from outside the house (I didn't let them expose these to the internet).
Is that just me or do I have a particularly crappy SD card? Anyone got any tips on how to improve disk IO? Would a USB3 external drive help with this?
USB3 could plausibly be faster than the SD card as the spec allows for 5Gbps+ but I don't know about Pis that much, I'd defer to someone with experience.
As a photographer I can tell you that SD cards, even high class ones have laughably awful speeds - any proper camera that needs to do video will use CFexpress Type B cards which are tremendously faster.
Seriously though, there are plenty of top-end cameras that use SD cards (all Nikons, for example).
EDIT: completely missed that you said video, ignore me!
That won't help OPs Pi4, the PCIe interface is new on the Pi5. USB is the best you can do on the older ones.
On Pi 4 I use a 2.5" SATA SSD (WD blue) on a startech USB3 adaptor and the performance seems to me much better than even good quality microsd cards.
Using an external USB3 drive also helps but it's still pretty slow. I found it too slow to use as a SAMBA file server when connected over WiFi, even though it was hardly pushing the CPU or memory. It would regularly fail to transfer large files.
One of the main selling points of the Pi 5 is faster IO. I'd love to see something tiny and power-sipping like the Zero but with the enhanced IO of the Pi 5.
My OS however is in the SD card which is Sandisk which I assumed was the good fair price brand.
Emphatically yes. It's an entirely different experience using a RPi 4 with a quality SSD. [0] It's also more expensive, so you have to decide whether that's important to you.
[0] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/portable...
In my opinion it's a mistake to split the difference with a cheap SSD or one you need to plug in using a SATA to USB adapter. (troubleshooting first step: if it's not the power supply, it's the SATA to USB adapter...)
After, "sudo apt-get install preload" it will cause previously used programs from the last session to auto-cache into ram. Combined with the above setting, the usual programs will launch much faster.
There is also the option to use an external SSD drive for better performance.
Part of the fun of pi4 was getting the OS optimized, but unless you have a legitimate "Sandisk Extreme Pro U3" or >30MB/sec rated sdcard it can still be slow (people have seen 4MB/sec on old counterfeit cards.)
sdcard bus overclocking is a thing as the pi tries to maximize slow hardware compatibility by default. Note this feature is limited on the pi4, but can significantly decrease boot times on older models.
YMMV =)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#Application_Performanc...
Has anyone who sees this attempted to run Home Assistant OS in a Home Assistant Yellow "compute module board" using a Radxa CM5?
It's tempting to me because the Radxa CM5 uses a mainline kernel instead of the Broadcom-modified kernel the RPi CM4 uses, but I understand that there may be some level of work needed to be done to support the compute module + board combo, and I'm curious if that is true for the Radxa CM5 + Yellow board combo.
Or have I misunderstood anything?
That's literally the same thing
Is it? Too me it seems smaller both in width and depth, but the height seems some mm or more than a typical credit card.
There are carriers that are smaller than a credit card such as the Ether Board and Wavlink BiCool mini board.
I always thought it was deceptive to compare regular Pi to credit card. But I just checked and credit card is almost the same size as regular Pi.
Would rather go for this. The NPU on the 3588 are now starting to be usable for stuff like basic LLMs
Unsure about the S2 variant though
Thanks to Raspberry Pi providing us with an early sample, we have been able to add Compute Module 5 (CM5) compatibility to the Home Assistant Yellow
It includes an H.265 (up to 4K 60 fps) hardware decode block—I tested that, and it works fine—but no other video hardware encode/decode, unfortunately.
The CPU is good enough for up to H.264 1080p encode at least, and with some tweaking could get a 4K stream or multiple HD streams encoded... but it's not ideal for that use case.