It’s been four years between the release of the Raspberry Pi 4 and the announcement of the Raspberry Pi 5 but the Pi 5 has been in development far longer. Raspberry Pi has published an article on how pieces of the Pi 5 came together, especially with all the custom silicon on it.
Raspberry Pi 5 is coming out in October 2023, yet one of its most important new components is a chip that has been in development since 2015; RP1. Technically, it’s the first bit of Raspberry Pi silicon (hence the number) as it entered development long before RP2040. Over the years, we’ve heard inside Raspberry Pi of this ‘Project Y’ device being planned for inclusion first in for Raspberry Pi 3B+, and then in Raspberry Pi 4.
“This is our longest running chip development program,” says James Adams. “I guess it’s the reason that we built ourselves a chip team in the first place… the idea is that we separate out Raspberry Pi I/O away from the main processor. That allows the main processor to be much simpler and you can iterate it more quickly, as it’s almost a purely digital design.”
The processor has a 4 lane PCIe bus, seen on the board traces. Early prototypes broke this out to a standard PCIe x4 connector and a plug-in board was used. They don’t talk about this much, but looking at the picture above, it’s a configuration many enthusiasts would like to test out.
The article also discusses the new power management chip (above, also custom, ingesting a whopping 5 amps) and the connectors. See the full article here.
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