What is a Raspberry Pi? With Eben Upton leading the project, the Raspberry Pi Foundation—a UK-registered charity—developed Raspberry Pi. Eben Epton of Cambridge University in the UK formally unveiled the world's tiniest desktop computer—also referred to as a card-type computer—in March 2012. Despite just being the size of a credit card, it can do all of a computer's essential tasks. "Raspberry Pi" is how the Raspberry Pi computer board is translated into Chinese. The organization wants to make computers more engaging for students and enhance the teaching of computer science and related subjects in classrooms. The foundation aspires for further applications to be developed for this computer and applied to more fields, both in developed and poor nations. In a nutshell, the Raspberry Pi is a tiny, inexpensive Linux computer.

CPU

The huge core frequency of RK3588(S) is precisely the same as the 4x Cortex-A76 @2.4GHz CPU BCM2712 has, but 3588 has an extra 4x Cortex-A55 @1.8GHz.

Although the TSMC 16nm process used by BCM2712 and the TSMC 8nm process used by 3588 are two generations apart, both SoCs require the utilization of a sizable heat sink and cooling fan.

Phoronix test data indicates that RK3588 performs better, yet in certain projects, BCM2712 outperforms RK3588.

GPU
The VC7 GPU, which is included with the BCM2712, fully supports Vulkan. Mesa is an open source driver that supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2 and is made available by the well-known open source outsourcing company Igalia.
There are numerous missing features and Vulkan 1.0 support only for the older BCM2711 model with VC6.

Released alongside ARMv9, the ARM Mali G610MC4 is a new generation of Mali GPU (10th generation Mali architecture, Valhall v3). It is utilized by RK3588. A more recent mobile GPU, the MTK Dimensity 8200 (MC6 standard), also uses the same design.

The open source Mali series GPU driver is created by collabora, another renowned open source outsourcing business. The business also created the Linux mainline driver and U-boot mainline driver for an RK3588 development board, as well as the PVR (PowerVR open source Vulkan driver) and NVK (Nvidia open source Vulkan driver).

But as of September 2023, the drm driver needs to be updated in order to fully exploit the hardware scheduler of Valhall v3, hence the mesa driver and drm driver for Valhall v3 are still in development.

Mali has a closed source driver that users can utilize if they don't care about open source. The closed source driver only supports EGL; that is, the GPU can only be used with Wayland or other window systems and cannot be used under X11; it does support OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan 1.2.

Kiwi Pi has 4/8/16/32GB of 64bit LPDDR4x 4224Mhz, Raspberry Pi 5 has 1/2/4/8GB of 32bit LPDDR4x 4267MT/s, and RK3588 supports LPDDR5 memory chips.

Despite improvements, the Raspberry Pi 5's memory bandwidth is still inferior to that of the majority of RK3588 development boards, which employ dual-channel memory.

IO
Except for SD card and HDMI, all of the Raspberry Pi 5's input/output is done through the RP1 IO controller. The RP1 is a stand-alone chip manufactured on a 40nm process that has a PIO and Cortex-m3 controller similar to the RP2040. It links to the BCM2712 via PCIE2.0x4, and it exposes USB 3.0x2 (which is a USB root controller rather than a USB hub), USB 2.0x2, Gigabit Ethernet, two 4-channel MIPI DSI/CSI (which requires a non-standard connector made by Raspberry Pi), GPIO, and analog video output.

The Raspberry Pi 5 has two micro HDMI interfaces that support HDR and have a maximum resolution of 4K60Hz (HDMI 2.0). It also has two 4-channel MIPI DSI that are shared with CSI and require adapters, as well as an analog video output that you will have to build yourself. As opposed to this, the RK3588 supports HDMI 2.1/eDP 1.3/DP1.4a and has a maximum resolution of 8K60Hz. It can simultaneously output two 4K60Hz, one 8K60Hz, and one 1080p60Hz picture.

The Raspberry Pi 5 has two micro HDMI interfaces that support HDR and have a maximum resolution of 4K60Hz (HDMI 2.0). It also has two 4-channel MIPI DSI that are shared with CSI and require adapters, as well as an analog video output that you will have to build yourself. As opposed to this, the RK3588 supports HDMI 2.1/eDP 1.3/DP1.4a and has a maximum resolution of 8K60Hz. It can simultaneously output two 4K60Hz, one 8K60Hz, and one 1080p60Hz picture.

The Raspberry Pi 5 lacks hardware encoding capability and can only hardware decode HEVC 4k60Hz video. It cannot hardware decode any other format.

RK3588 is a SoC that can be used with set-top boxes. It can handle hardware encoding of HEVC/H264 at 8K30Hz and hardware decoding of HEVC/VP9/AVS2 at 8k60Hz, AVC at 8K30Hz, and AV1 at 4K60Hz.

While the Kiwi Pi supports 2.5G Ethernet and Wi-Fi6E (M2 E key network card), the Raspberry Pi 5 includes a Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi5 wireless chip.