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