Pretty wild to see a drop-in replacement that's actually faster - usually that's marketing speak for "technically compatible but slower in real life." The fact that you can just pop this into existing CM4 hardware and get 2-3x performance is impressive. Finally, my commercial display can run Crysis! (Ok, maybe not, but that USB 3 upgrade is sweet).
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.
Does anyone know if it's a good idea to base a product on Pi CM4/5 (or has experience with this)? I wonder how the availability any price in large quantities is (like 10k per year) and how reliable the connector is in comparison to a soldered SOM.
While we have never used the compute module in large quantities, we have used it numerous times for small batches with 1-2k/month and had no issue there
If you plan on using it for small series of <10k/a I wouldn't worry too much
They are available in that quantity. They do make sense up to around that number, although the around 1K is the sweet spot. Laying out and certifying a high speed design (not just a noddy A9 with DDR2) is expensive and it's all NRE cost. The cost of the components for the CM is driven down by the combined volume significantly - if you want to buy 1-10K of those by yourself, you will pay a premium over what RasPi gets them for. You might not need a full 6/8 layer board for the whole product as well. As important, the software support is great as it's just a standard RasPi - you don't have to support your own custom image.
Volume pricing on custom commercial Pi SoM are not common, but do happen at the Pi foundation.
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
In general, the pi SoM usually offer 8 to 12 year availability maps, and haven't pulled price ballooning after launch.
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.
I got a raspberry 4 recently and was tinkering with it. I was appalled at the apparent disk IO performance of the thing, opening a browser takes several seconds.
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.
The Korg Kronos (and I suppose the Nautilus as well) are just regular x86 PCs (I believe using Atom CPUs) running a custom Linux kernel and custom software
I'm guessing that's with whatever stock software/firmware stack Raspberry PI themselves ship, surely can be made a lot faster by not having to probe various hardware ports you know aren't used, for example.
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.
There is no "Broadcom-modified kernel". There's a fork with changes needed to support all Pi hardware at https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux. Unlike some boards were you're eternally stuck at old versions, the fork is actively maintained (currently mostly at 6.6, soon 6.12) with its changes regularly getting upstreamed. You post make it sound like the Pi kernel is a mess, which it is absolutely not.
I was tempted to do something similar when I got my Yellow because the low availability of the CM4s back then, but it seemed that, at least with older Radxas there were problems with kernels or compatibility. It might work with the newer one if you say it's mainline kernel but haven't found anything in the forum in quick search...
Does anyone have any recommendations for a CM carrier board that has ethernet and ~4 sata ports that I can attach external drives to? I'd quite like to build my own NAS but I don't know what board to use
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!)
Those both look good, though I might have to save up a bit to afford them haha. I'd probably end up printing my own case, so that's not really an issue. Looking forward to your testing of the CM5 Taco =)
In all honesty, and considering that everything you build with a SBC is not that powerful and a cabling mess, I would recommend to go for a refurbished ThinkCenter Tiny or similar + an external HDD Rack.
Atleast thats the route I went, and I am vastly less annoyed about it.
I got a small thinkcenter a while back that I currently run some docker stuff on (homeassistant, pihole, some custom stuff), and I am pretty happy with it. Do they have a spare pcie or something to attach all the drives to, though? I don't remember seeing anything like that when I was inside mine, though that was a while back, so my memory may be wrong
In theory you can use the WiFi-One, though I don't know if that one is BIOS-locked. I just use it with USB3 and a 4 Bay Enclosure, which probably someone is gonna explain to me is the worst idea since leaded gasoline, but I have absolutely no Issues with my ZFS NAS for 5 years that way.
Over on reddit I once floated a similar idea but everyone exclaimed that USB enclosures sucks and you should not use them at all. Now technically you could - with some PCIe expansion cards - connect SAS/SATA HDDs to the ports on your mini/SFF PC, but then you need an enclosure for holding, powering and cooling the disks. Holding and cooling is simple enough and there's enclosures on AliExpress that cost like 10 bucks that do it for you, but you'd still need a PSU outside of the PC to power the disks. At that point the USB enclosure starts looking even more enticing.
Which one are you using right now? There's some brands out there that are considered really bad by the community.
Ah, good point, I hadn't considered a USB solution. I might look into that, though I'll have to see if there's a good way to keep all the cables looking tidy and not have a cable coming out the front and then disappearing back inside again haha
Yeah, I've been considering just going for an x86 thing, though finding a mini pc with 4 satas might be tough, and there's the whole raspi ecosystem that would help with troubleshooting. I'll add that to the potential list though =)
The easiest way might be getting an ITX board with N100/150 from CWWK or Topton. They usually come with 4-6 SATA ports and the CPU soldered on. Then you just buy your favorite case and plug in your drives. Excluding the cost of the drives you might end up spending about $250, depending on your case and PSU selection. The problem with using SBCs or mini PCs that way is that you need an enclosure to hold, power, and cool down your disks, and even that is assuming that you can actually connect them via a SATA/SAS connection which may not be easily available from within your case.
Looks like the Radxa CM5 is still significantly faster than Pi CM5, while only being slightly more expensive (113USD vs 95USD for the 8GB/64GB model from what I could find). Anyone here has any experience with it?
Technically the BCM2712 doesn't have any hardware encode support, only software/CPU.
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.
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.
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