Raspberry Pi 5 Wishlist
Imagining a Future Superpowered Pi
For those few who have been fortunate enough to find a Pi 4 available for sale in the past year, I congratulate you. Thanks to the combination of pandemic and supply chain constraints, finding the latest Pi computer hardware from the Raspberry Pi foundation has been a challenge, to say the least. In fact, the Pi 4 is more difficult to procure than next-gen gaming consoles like the Xbox Series X and high-end GPU’s like those from AMD or Nvidia. That said, the Raspberry Pi engineers have no doubt been hard at work designing the next generation of their flagship.
Given that the Pi 4 was released over 3 years ago, the time is right for a new model to appear. Of course, there probably won’t be an announcement any time soon (no) thanks to the current woes in the high-tech supply chain. Indeed, the recently announced Pi Pico W isn’t even on sale yet, and all preorders were almost instantly sold out.
Though manufacturing lines can’t keep up with demand, the sharp electrical engineers at the Raspberry Pi Foundation are constrained only by the limitations of their imaginations. Following are some features I’d like to see them bring to fruition in the next release of the Pi, most likely to be dubbed the Raspberry Pi 5.
CPU
It would be a coup if the Pi 5 could match the processing speed and agility of today’s premium ARM64-based smartphones. I would also like to see an option with an on-board AI processing chip akin to SoC’s from Nvidia that could do real-time image processing and recognition from the Pi’s camera.
RAM
Make 8 GB the standard configuration and boost the ceiling as high as 32 GB.
Storage
Natively support an option to boot and maintain the file system from a plug-in peripheral that could span from an NVMe or SSD drive to a full-blown RAID 6 array. Leave SD cards only as a legacy fallback option.
Ports
Migrate the existing USB-C port to a Thunderbolt 4-compatible USB-C port and support up to four 4K monitors.
These are just my top four wishlist items for the next generation of the Raspberry Pi. What’s on your wishlist, and what would you build with your superpowered Pi? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments.
Be sure to pick up a copy of Portable Python Projects by Mike Riley, available from The Pragmatic Bookshelf. You can save 35 percent with promo code python_automation_2022 now through August 31, 2022. Promo codes are not valid on prior purchases.
