This week’s EYE ON NPI (video) is an EYE ON A PI – it’s the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, the latest update to the easily embeddable mini modules that make industrial developers happy by giving them all the power of a Pi 5 in a ready-to-go pluggable solution.
The Raspberry Pi computer launched with the goal of bringing low cost computing to the education market and through the Pi Foundation they still have that charitable goal while also spinning off the manufacturing / sales company into the Trading Company which went public this year. The first few Raspberry Pi computers were ‘all in one’ style, with power, GPIO, Video and Audio output, USB, Ethernet, and Micro SD card storage.
Eventually enough folks asked for an enclosure-friendly version that would allow an “I/O” board to be designed with the ports in a different arrangement – the big-sized-Pis have them arrayed over 3 sides.
To solve this conundrum, and to satisfy the growing industrial/commercial market, the Pi engineers designed the Compute Module 1 which is still available.
This clever SODIMM packaged board has all the GPIO and peripheral pins on a plug-in connector so you can slot it into an existing design securely and easily – SODIMM sockets come both vertical and horizontal.
This was later updated to the CM3 and CM3+ which was on par with the Pi 3 instead of the Pi 1, with significantly higher computational power.
However, perhaps because they wanted a more compact module, or to support high-frequency signals better, the next generation of Compute Module 4’s came in a flat rectangular shape with dual 100-pin Hirose contacts.
Another nice thing that happened with the CM4 is it became available in dozens of configurations: 1/2/4/8 GB RAM, SD or 8/16/32GB MMC, and with or without WiFi/BLE/BT.
This allowed commercial users to go with the ‘lowest cost option’ needed to fulfill their requirements – whereas the Pi 4 comes in only 3 or 4 RAM options.
The ready-to-go software – no kernel compiling or OpenWRT configuration required! Long-term hardware support and low prices pushed the CM4 into more and more designs.
Which brings us to the NPI of the week, the Compute Module 5! The CM5 is a big upgrade, with quad A76s at 2.4GHz for a 2x computing upgrade, increased RAM options of up to 16G, increased MMC option of 64GB, USB 3.0 ports, PCIe and RP1 hardware interfacing with PIO support. If you have an existing CM4 design, you can easily upgrade or update to the new hotness. If you’re new to integrating Raspberry pi, then while you may think of the Pi as a hobby/school computer, that isn’t necessarily true anymore with 72% of Pi computers sold going into commercial/industrial use.
That means you can be confident that you’ll get consistent pricing and availability for a long time so that you can work on designing the rest of your product for the CM series to plug into.
And like the CM4, the CM5 is available in a variety of configurations and prices, from $45 to $135.
Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5’s are currently only available for pre-order, with estimated ship times in Q1 of 2025 to DigiKey – and the moment DigiKey gets some in stock, they’ll ship your pre-order instantly so you can get integrating with the Pi ecosystem the very next day. Don’t wait till release day because they’ll sell out instantly! Instead, when you pre-order from DigiKey, your order goes into a queue and you’ll get first-come-first-served prioritization.
See the CM5 on DigiKey. See the Adafruit video below:
