Four years after the Raspberry Pi 4 shipped, today the Raspberry Pi 5 is launching with a much improved SoC leading to significant performance gains.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is designed to deliver a 2~3x performance improvement over the Raspberry Pi 4. The Raspberry Pi 5 features a quad-core Cortex-A76 processor that clocks up to 2.4GHz, compared to the four Cortex-A72 cores found in the Raspberry Pi 4 that only clocked up to 1.8GHz. The graphics are also much-improved with now having an 800MHz VideoCore VII graphics processor over the VideoCore VI graphics with the Raspberry Pi 4. The Raspberry Pi 5 is capable of driving two 4K @ 60Hz displays and features 4K @ 60 HEVC decode hardware capabilities.
Also interesting with the Raspberry Pi 5 is that it features in-house silicon in the form of the RP1 “southbridge” used for much of the board’s I/O capabilities. This southbridge should yield faster USB I/O along with other I/O bandwidth upgrades like a doubling of the peak SD card performance. The Raspberry Pi 5 also features a single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface for improved connectivity.
An M.2 makes it really difficult for a kid to pop the card out, plug it into a computer and flash it.
I think RPI Foundation is still holding onto its education-targeted roots.
I think the compute models are more targeted at the industrial/commercial side of requirements.
And any homelab enthusiast would probably be better buying a cheap used/refurbished thin-client
Yes, I think the Foundation still favours SD cards because they are cheap and easy to use. Which suits the Pi’s original base of education, hobbyists etc.
Of course that doesn’t stop the market seeing things differently and dropping Pis straight in to production use cases instead of moving up to the Compute modules.
I think the SD card problems are a little exaggerated too. They may not be the fastest but they are reliable enough if reputable brands are used.
I had three cards from Kingston and SanDisk fail on me quite regularly while using the Pi.
M.2 / external storage is definitely the way to go