An Interview with the CEO of Raspberry Pi: Pi 5, Future Computing, and Ice Cream?

MicroCenterMaker · October 2023

Our very own Andy Leer got to sit down with Eben Upton, the CEO of Raspberry Pi, to talk about the recently announced Raspberry Pi 5. They covered everything from the history of Raspberry Pi to future of kids and computing, with a brief detour for ice cream. We're highlighting a few great moments here, but the full 20 minute interview live now over on our YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld8RMD2fTPA

Quotes edited in-article for clarity

On the Pi 5 Feature Set:

Andy: We're very excited - and I think I speak on behalf of the whole community - some of the features of the Pi 5 really set it apart from the Pi 4

Ebon: It's even it's got a power button!

Andy: I know, I know. That's, that's huge. And the real-time clock battery connector.

Ebbon: I mean this was a $25 million engineering program for us.[Its] the first flagship Raspberry Pi product, that has Raspberry Pi Silicon. That alone was about a $15 million component of the program. But I think, you know, when we do, the stack list is like 100-point font: POWER BUTTON, 50-point font: real-time clock. Then ten-point font: 2.4GHz Cortex-A76 with 2MB L3 cache.

On the Improvements over Pi 4

Andy: One of the things that I want to convey to our customers and our users is all of the new features and what really puts this board into a - not that the Pi 4 wasn't - but a full computer scenario.

Ebon: Yeah, that's an interesting thing. I think we're looking at about a factor of... we're saying two-to-three, but it's for most use cases it seems to be on the three end of of two-to-three [times] performance uplift over Pi 4, and that's uplift over the 1.8 gig Pi 4.

And remember the Pi 4 already picked up 20% increment during it's lifespan as we ran from 1.5 to 1.8GHz. So its then another two-to-three [times] on top of that. And that means you've got probably about, depending how you measure, maybe a 130 [to] 150 [times] performance, delta between Raspberry Pi 1 from 11 years ago on Raspberry Pi five.

On Non-General-Purpose Computing:

Andy: What sort of things, projects, do you anticipate coming down the line that people might be using [the Pi 5 for] outside of even just general purpose computing?

Ebon: Well, look, I'm super excited about the general purpose computing angle, particularly the PCI Express. We have a we have a little FPC connector on the board that exposes a single lane - an X1 - of Gen 2 PCI Express. A,nd then we have the official case. [Y]ou have a fan which is positioned over the over the CPU, and then you have the PCI Express connector at the edge of the board.

I think what I think we're going to be able to do shortly after launch is to produce an accessory that takes that PCI Express line into a kind of L-shaped board which exposes it to an M.2 connector that allows you to plug a small NVMe driveexplosive for them to connect to the line, to plug a small line V drive into it - a 2230 forman NVMe drive. And thata drive will fit inside the enclosure because that L-shape fits around the fan. And so what you have is you'll have a completely compact enclosure that has very high speed, nonvolatile storage.

Andy: And high capacity with like, let's say a one terabyte or two terabyte. Now you're talking about network attached storage options.

Ebon: Yeah, yeah. So we are particularly so so far for general purpose computing, obviously in particular within.

On the Future of Computing:

Andy: For our children's generation, what are your hopes and dreams for their interaction with computing?

Eben: I, I think we went through a very dark period, right? We went through a period where there was an expectation from everybody. Education system, policymakers, parents that the future for children was office skills. The future, the bright future of our children was to take a step back from really understanding what happens inside the piece of hardware that's in front of them and just say, Hey, you know, this is a tool. This is a tool for my department, This is a tool for my productivity. This is not something, this is a piece of functional magic.

I think the huge change that we've helped create, but certainly that we've been present at the same time as is this, this, this move back to an acknowledgment that there is value, even if you're not saying everybody needs to be a computer programmer, but that areas valley and people having some understanding of what this object in front of them is actually doing inside.