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.
What I'd like to see is something like an updated and optimised ~pi3-spec device with EMMC or an m.2 sata slot. Yes I know I can put a pi zero2 into a breakout board, but they connect via USB and that severely limits performance.
I recently decommissioned my pis (2x 3b and 1x 4b) and replaced them all with a single intel n95 based NUC (which cost less than a single pi4 8gb at the time) and I didn't need any real gpio other than some serial ports, but if the right device came along with reliable storage I'd consider moving back to pis.