The Pi 5's PCIe implementation has a lot of fixes—to the point where after only a few days of work, Coreforge over on GitHub has Minecraft rendering through the GPU (only at x1 speed so far).

The CM4 uses the silicon from Pi 4, which was never really a fully-baked PCIe implementation, so I'll forgive them a little there. But it opened up a huge number of possibilities that I think will be realized on Pi 5 (and hopefully a CM5 eventually).

And regarding power consumption / efficiency, don't forget about the usefulness of a full Linux computer running at less than a watt (like the Zero 2 W); or with the Pi 5 you can use the watchdog timer to boot and shut down now, going from idle at 2-3W to power off at 0.01W if you need a remote 'edge' device.

But the hardware and efficiency were never the primary drivers for Pi. It's the fact you can buy one (well, sometimes...) and use it. You don't have to spend a few hours getting the right OS, figuring out the right tools to flash it reading sparse forum-based documentation...

While Pi software support isn't perfect (it's a little baffling to me that there is still so much that hasn't been upstreamed to mainline Linux in over a decade, but I digress), it's generally light years ahead of the random SBCs you see from... wherever (yes, many from China, but there are others too). Armbian support is a plus, and many of them do run Armbian, but community support when you run into issues is very hit-or-miss. And manufacturer support is pretty much nonexistent for most of these. Some of that may just be language barrier, but the end result is the same.

This is a weird subthread that smells like astroturfing.

But the software for other SBCs is extremely bad, I've never heard of any Pi on release or after that has any software or hardware bugs.

Proprietary blobs aren't that bad with Broadcom...