News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development

> "...: It sounds like the key feature will be 'more': a faster CPU and faster IO, rather than new features."

Raspberry Pi Holdings is a embedded systems manufacturer for pity's sake; we don't need more from them, we need less. [EDIT] A faster Raspberry Pi 6 is encroaching on the territory of the Intel N150 and its successors and mainstream Linux distributions and that is a battle they would lose in terms of price and performance.

Give us a Raspberry Pi Zero 3W with proper sleep states to reduce sleep power consumption, lower idle power while awake, and 1 GB of RAM even if it doubles the price.

Pi's refusal to drop a USB-C on Pico due to cost increases is a terrible call IMO.

I seriously cannot fathom being someone doing development who wouldn't pay $0.50 extra to purge the last micro USB from their desktop.

The flagship Pi boards are also hitting the thermal design ceiling of what makes sense for this size or platform. Pi 5 is IMO already on that edge because it pretty much needs active cooling and a dedicated power supply. Going past this point means it will compete with much more powerful platforms and likely loose due to it’s architectural limitations.

> When asked about the Pi Zero 2W, Eben said the substrate supply is constrained—basically, so many AI chips are being made that even older chips using older process nodes have to fight for the actual silicon wafers to use to make the chips.

I keep hearing voices invalidate each other, is the bottleneck the raw silicon substrate, or fab capacity?

What purity levels are required for say Pi Zero 2W?

The volume of monocrystalline silicon used in solar panels is orders of magnitude greater than the volume used in IC's / RAM production.

Is the actual bottleneck 11N + grade silicon wafers while 6N to 9N grade used in solar panels remains unaffected?

The 8GB Pi 5, at $170 [1], is encroaching on Jetson Orin Nano Super's $240 price point [2]. But the Jetson has a faster CPU (newer a78ae cores rather than a76) and, obviously, a whole-ass GPU.

[1] https://www.microcenter.com/product/673711/raspberry-pi-5

[2] https://www.microcenter.com/product/691058/nvidia-jetson-ori...

It used to be that raspberry pi was a cheap pc. Well it's not longer cheap.

And at their price point, you could just get a mini PC and have better performance, or if you want to use it as a microcontroller, you can just use an arduino, esp32, or an actual microcontroller for a fraction of the price and power consumption.

So, what do people actually do with these pies?

Hard to care anymore. They made it abundantly clear they dont care about their original audience of makers and education anymore now that the industrial market are so reliant on them. Not to mention the whole crapping all over their customers on social media and then accusing them of some sort of coordinated 'attack' just made it clear they're clueless about their audience.

The price increases were the end of the Pi being a viable option for most application in my eyes.

The PI5 was a real downgrade for me with its lack of proper hardware h264 decoding as in the earlier versions (playing back h264 is my primary use case.) I will buy a PI6, if that comes back, else I stay with my reliable, and passively cooled, PI3.

I have bought an rpi at every generation. And I still have yet to find an actual use for them.

Everything they do from a compute perspective is just better with a mini pc or old laptop with a mobile spec chip.

Everything they do from a programmability perspective is just better with a microcontroller specific to the task.

I just don't see the actual market position for these things. They were supposed to be a cheap board, but you can't actually buy them cheaply because the vendors upcharge so much.

My opinion is that Raspberry Pi has to release an NPU, and start/revolutionise the open source NPU communities and tech. Raspberry Pi's has to find itself useful in vision AI applications (extremely common in industries these days). Without it I think Arduino with its new Qualcomm boards will kill it.

I really really wished they released a Raspberry Pi running a RISC-V 23 processor :(

I run the media lab at one of Europe's must prolific art universities. The variant I tend to use most is the 3B+.

Reasons: - full sized HDMI connector - headphone connector - good bang for the buck

If I had one wish for any new product in the Raspberry line it would be: Do the Raspberry Pi 3++ or something. Same thing. Faster, but with USB-C power connector, 4K Video resolution, 2× USB-C I/O, 2× USB-A peripherals and maybe M.2 support.

Would love to see actual security focused hardware/software features, like full OP-TEE, fTPM (or a more ideally a real physical TPM), and similar. For example, so that the OTP isn't the only way to store a disk encryption unlock key.

The existing secure boot mechanisms aren't bad, but allowing for more than one public key hash in OTP would be nice, too.

These kinds of things are expected to be on modern embedded SOCs and SOMs now.

Looks like the RPI5 is like $200 in Canada now. We might have lost the plot

It seems like esp32 boards have taken over the pi's original market as developing for them has gotten easier while pis have gotten more expensive

I was thinking about the RPi 6 yesterday whilst realising I couldn't set up my RPi Zero 2W anymore - the OS has become burdensome - tied strictly to an imager, that gives me an allergic reaction. Yes - they did all this for the uninitiated - but for Raspberry Pi OS Lite - bring back this experience: dd the image, write ssh into the boot drive, SSH in - change password, fully set up in almost zero fuss or effort.

Then I actually couldn't set the thing up because of the mini HDMI connection - I have a mini to HDMI cable, but to use my portable screen with it I need mini HDMI to MINI HDMI. Don't get me started on micro HDMI - almost everyone of of those connectors I've bought slips off or breaks in the device. Every time I go to set up an RPi5 I end up having to order another one of those tiny connectors.

Full HDMI for all new devices please. Even if the second display can't be connected.

These days a 175 GBP N95 from a no-name Chinese OEM on Amazon, with 16 GB of RAM and a 500GB SATA SSD is way better value and performance - and importantly - zero fuss - standard setup.

They aren't actually shipping the new RP2350 silicon revision on Pico 2 boards yet. If you want the errata fixes, you've gotta source the chips and make your own boards.

I recently found out about the Radxa Dragon Q6A. A Qualcomm chip with faster CPUs, a good GPU, a DSP and AI accelerator, and a hardware video encoder seems very compelling. It even supports Windows if you want that for some reason.

The thing I've always wanted in a Raspberry Pi is an SBC and microcontroller on one board.

For me, Pi6 shall focus on NPU to run edge models instead of getting into minipc space, e.g. 10TOPS built-in, that will be slightly better than Rockchip 3588 which was produced 4 years back at 6TOPS, and way more powerful than NXP's 2TOPS. 10TOPS is the sweet spot for edge AI as far as I can tell.

The raspberry pi CEO said that some of the boards will be delayed because of RAM prices.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Raspberry-Pi-discusses-Zero-3-...

The only way I'll buy another raspberry pi is if they come with a power supply that's guaranteed to work with them. I got tired of the random reboots in the night and replaced my media center/NAS with an old Nuc.

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