The Radxa X5 hasn’t been officially announced yet, but the schematics and component placement maps have quietly appeared in Radxa’s download centre. Having spent time with the X4 over the past year, I was keen to see what they’ve addressed and whether there were any surprises in store.
Digging through the schematic and component placement map, a few interesting changes caught my attention, though nothing particularly groundbreaking. Perhaps that’s to be expected, though?
One of the X4’s “quirks” was its 32-bit memory bus, which left performance on the table despite having LPDDR5 RAM. The schematics show that the X5 has moved to a proper 64-bit implementation. Anyone who felt the X4 was holding back the N100’s capabilities (GPU-related workloads will benefit from getting more memory bandwidth, as well as the improved GPU) will want to pay attention here, as memory bandwidth should see a healthy boost.
Raspberry Pi’s RP2350 microcontroller replaces the RP2040 for handling the GPIO headers. The general approach remains the same (GPIO control happens through the microcontroller rather than directly) but you get the RP2350’s improvements. The BOOT button stays on the underside.
The X5 gets the RP2350A flavour, meaning it has 30 GPIO and no onboard flash storage of its own.
The X4’s small notch alongside the GPIO pins made case compatibility a pain point for something marketed as Raspberry Pi-sized. The component placement map shows that that has been eliminated, so the X5 should slot into standard Pi cases and accessories without issue.
The Intel N150 replaces the N100, offering a 200MHz frequency bump (3.4GHz peak), 50% more L2 cache at 6MB, and a GPU clock increase to 1000MHz. Still sits within a 6W TDP rating. These aren’t massive changes, but they should provide ever so slightly more breathing room for more demanding workloads, especially on the GPU side.
Schematics typically appear shortly before launch, so an official announcement probably isn’t far off. Radxa’s been quiet on details, but these documents give us our first proper look at what’s coming.
I just hope that it’s not a pre-order and wait a couple of months kind of deal, as I’m hoping to test how the memory bandwidth changes, and the slight bump on the CPU translates into real-world performance differences compared to the X4. If we look at the list of Intel N100 SBCs on sbc.compare, you can clearly see that the X4 falls behind when compared to the Latte Panda Mu, and the Radxa X4L.
If you’ve been eyeing an X4 but held off due to the form factor issues or memory limitations, these changes address both. Whether the X5 becomes a “must upgrade” for existing X4 owners will depend on pricing and how well the thermal situation has been managed.
From the looks of the documents we have, we’re likely to see the exact same cooler/heatsink combo for the X5 as we did the X4, which is fine, it did a decent job.
RTC and PWR buttons remain in the same place, so all in all, I think we’re seeing a decent iteration on the X4, and the improvements/changes look positive. Now to see when I can get my hands on one to see for myself!
Bret has worked with Raspberry Pi computers for almost 10 years now and in that time he's benchmarked and tested over 30 Single Board computers. In his day job, he's a systems administrator for a large cloud computing provider.
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