Re: FYI: RPi5 power consumption reply [Not on topic for original "Future of armv7" message]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2025 at 6:00 PM Mark Millard <[email protected]> wrote:
> Tomek CEDRO <tomek_at_cedro.info> wrote on
> Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2025 15:21:23 UTC :
> > . . .
> > . . . rPI-5 . . . Another
> > thing to notice is the idle power consumption ~1..2W for the SBC and
> > peak energy is only 5..7W (in theory 5V*3A~15W) so it can be powered
> > with energy harvesting!!
> [ From: https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-arch/2025-November/001076.html ]
> Just an FYI:
> https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberry-pi.html#decrease-raspberry-pi-5-wattage-when-turned-off
> reports:
>
> QUOTE
> Decrease Raspberry Pi 5 wattage when turned off
> By default, the Raspberry Pi 5 consumes around 1W to 1.4W of power when turned off. This can be decreased by manually editing the EEPROM configuration with sudo rpi-eeprom-config -e. Change the settings to the following:
> BOOT_UART=1
> POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=1
> BOOT_ORDER=0xf416
> This should drop the power consumption when powered down to around 0.01W.
> END QUOTE

Thanks Mark :-)

I have this set already, as well as BOOT_ORDER with "3" (0xf341) that
enables "USBBOOT" firmware flashing over USB with `rpiboot` utility
that saves SD card shuffling on each firmware test iteration [1].

What I mean by "Idle" is not power down, but fully operational SBC
ready to work, waiting for work, nothing to work :-) Peak power
consumption was measured at maximum load by `gmake -j4`  firmware
compilation. For sure idle machine may be powered down and powered on
after some time to see if there is some work to do. Anyway this looks
really impressive compared to "big" desktop machine I am surprised
myself :-)

Tomek

[1] https://github.com/apache/nuttx/issues/17303

--
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info