Eben Upton Hints at an RP2040 Successor, Promises a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 in 2024
"We know what people don't like [and] what people do like," Upton says, "and we have a chip team."
Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton has hinted that a successor to the company's wildly popular RP2040 dual-core microcontroller may be on the way — and that the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 will launch in 2024, with "a high degree of commonality" with the earlier Compute Module 4.
Speaking at the Cambridge Raspberry Jam event this weekend, Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton put numbers to the flow of new Raspberry Pi 5 boards which is still struggling to keep up with sky-high demands. "Today, [we] are making about 10,000 [Raspberry] Pi 5s per day, out of a total of 40,000 Pis per day," Upton told attendees, according a summary posted to Mastodon by Jonathan Pallant.
All of those devices, the company has previously promised, are ring-fenced for makers and tinkerers with industrial buyers being pushed back to 2024 for their stock — a way of making up for the shortages which had previously plagued the Raspberry Pi 4, with industrial buyers being given priority during the component shortage crisis.
Even with 10,000 units rolling off the production line per day, though, Raspberry Pi is selling the boards as quickly as it can make them — with little surprise, perhaps, given the impressive performance gains the device shows over its predecessor.
More interesting than production numbers, though, were Upton's comments on the low-cost Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core microcontroller and the Raspberry Pi Pico board on which it sits. "We know what people don't like about [RP]2040," Upton admitted at the event, "the [Arm Cortex-]M0+ [architecture], could have more RAM, could have more GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output], and we know what people do like — the PIO [Programmable Input/Output blocks]… and we have a chip team."
While Upton stopped short of announcing an actual successor product, it's clear the company is at least thinking about what comes after the RP2040. No release date for a new chip nor a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 to showcase it were discussed, but Upton did go on to confirm that the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 system-on-module is design-complete and scheduled for launch in 2024 — bringing with it "a high degree of commonality" with the Compute Module 4 and "USB 3.0 where some of the MIPI lane[s] used to be."