Raspberry Pi 5 slims down for cut-price 2 GB RAM version Almost a year after Raspberry Pi 5 debuted, a cheaper 2 GB version has appeared for users that want to save a little cash or for whom 4 or 8 GB was just slightly excessive. The hardware is nearly identical to the computer launched in 2023, just with less RAM. At the unveiling of the $50 computer, Pi supremo Eben Upton told …
While I personally think that the RPi5 is overkill for most projects, there's no doubt that there are many takers for more speed and memory. But this sort of makes the 2GB version moot. And, aside from the price, the RPi5 needs a fairly beefy power supply, which makes it less suitable for many of the projects where RPis have excelled in the past and continues to do so. For me the RPi4 hits the sweet spot of vastly suprerior bandwidth with minimal additional requirements. I'm trying to think of where a cutdown RPi5 would make sense: Point of sale system, perhaps?
But, you have to remember that the RPi is a hobbyist and prototype platform. Large-scale industrial projects will want to use different and probably even smaller SoCs, but are happy to prototype using RPis because of the de facto ISA and the easy access to peripherals and toolchain.
It's not surprising that as the available ARM cores (and available SoC) organically improved for embedded (often set-top) and mobile devices, RPi took advantage to improve the user experience. But yes, they've ended up at the point where your "by default" performance is way overkill for tinkering and past "basic desktop" level.
For general computing, you're better off with a used uSFF Optiplex or ThinkCentre. Quad core i5-4xxx boxen are £70-100, can be stacked with lots of RAM and have proper SATA/PCIe, even M2 on newer models.
The Pi has an advantage in GPIO and the ecosystem/library/community support for it.
But if hardware tinkering what you're doing, then a Le Potato has the Cortex A53 cores used in the Pi3, is form-factor compatible with the 3B+ and costs £24 instead of £33 (at the cost of no onboard Wifi or Bluetooth - you're using ethernet or dongles). Libre have focussed on that hobbyist side (as well as embedded things like signage, as they've emphasised 4K support, a decent video stack, etc). Coming in 30% cheaper is nothing to sneeze at.
That original educational idea that Pis were cheap and easy for schools to use for teaching (and hosing your install could be easily remedied by reflashing the SD card) never really seemed to pan out. If kids manage to hose a Windows install on a regular desktop whilst you're teaching them Python, then their user accounts have all sorts of permissions they shouldn't! You still need all the peripherals and swapping from normal PCs to RPis at the start of class is a faff.
As others have mentioned, an awful lot of the interesting hardware stuff is now going on around the Pico which gives you a super cheap microcontroller that you can easily stuff all sorts of logic into with MicroPython, without a full linux stack (and lots of community support).
Let's be fair... the original Pi cost £29 in 2012.
Inflation corrected (as per the BoE) that would be £40.40 now.
So the price is only slightly higher than it was a decade ago, with a pretty impressive increase in performance (and ports that line up)
But if we ignore the newest addition...
You now have the Pico boards down at well under £5
The Zero boards are under £10/£15 (Zero/ZeroW)
The original boards aren't sold any more, but the 3A is under £25
The 3B, 3B+, and 4 are still under £35
So whilst the 5 now goes for £47/57/77 (2/4/8 GB RAM) there is alot more computer in there for the relatively small increase.
The face that the 3s and 4 are still available at a price that frankly makes the original look expensive is a good thing.
The power of these machines has increased to the point where you could reasonably consider one as a desktop replacement. And with the 5 you can add nvme storage - which is a significant improvement.
I generally have always "inherited" Raspberry Pis from collegues who get "bored" with them.
That said, for the use-case vs a cheap thin-client mini computer, I find that the only one really worth the price is the Pi Zero (2w) range. Cheap and effectively a super computer by 80s standards.
Talking of 80s standards, I did SQL database stuff on a VAX 11-750 for a public utility. I'm retired now, and use Pi Zero 2Ws as LAN Web/SQL test beds for some pro bono stuff that I develop. Generally they are good for 10+ concurrent web users, each running up to 10+ SQL inserts/reads/updates per second, which would be generally similar to the VAX SQL performance that I needed. I think the VAX cost ~£150,000 - The 2W board is about 1/10,000 the price and works out ~~4,000 times the power in VAX MIPS
I've recently fallen in love with the Zeros - I've gone from 0 to 6 in about two months... - because they're cheap, small, can do all the electronics stuff (cameras included) and generally fast *enough*.
If I were buying a new proper Pi for electronics it would at most be a 4; I doubt I would need more computing power than that provides, and wouldn't feel like spending the extra (and needing a heatsink) on a Pi 5. Perhaps for server-like applications they have a place, but the high-end ones with added extras are comparable in cost to a cheap mini-pc and much less powerful - less RAM, no storage - and a little thing from Minisforum serves (literally) quite well.
For me the big gain is the M2 SSD support. SD cards were always one if the achilles heels for long term usage. My NAS is running OMV and stopped working because of the number of disk errors on the SD card. It now has a shiny new PI5+M2 to manage the OS part, which hopefully will be more robust
A 2GB version would of been perfect for this, since it does not have many demands on memory
Well, personally I had no issues finding a compatible SSD and it has been pretty smooth sailing so far.
That's not to say there might be others who do have issues, but I would say it is no worse in finding compatible hardware for any linux platform. HW support always lags, but generally it seems pretty good
Of course I could of bought a N100 or some old PC, but I wanted something small and with a low energy footprint, something no N100 really offers.
> N100
Yawn.... this again? You suggested the "N100" several days ago, and when I pointed out that the "N100" was a CPU, and not a complete system, your response was to link to an N100 system being sold on AliExpress.
I asked you what your experience of actually using that N100-based system personally had been like, but you said nothing further.
Which leads me to assume that- despite shoving your opinion down our throats- you hadn't even used the system you linked to, or anything else based on the N100 for that matter(!), and you're solely judging it based on the listed spec.
Ironic considering that the things you condemned the RPi 5 for- the flakey NVMe and PCIe implementation and compatibility issues- you only discovered after you'd actually used it yourself.
(And that said, if you'd pointed out those otherwise legitimate criticisms in a less obviously and obnoxiously partisan manner- like this poster did- people might have been more willing to pay attention to what you said).
Pico board seem attractive when it comes to price, but if you want to do something more complex you face a brickwall as there is no more advanced Pico available.
There is new version but is very much tinkering around edges, keep it safe.
I don't see a reason why anyone would invest time learning it when there is STM32 that offers much better growth path and is not that much more expensive. There are also offerings from other companies.
The same thing regarding Raspberry Pi. There are much better and cheaper products now.
RPi stopped being a leader, people now probably buy because of the brand.
It's a shame really.
Integrated FPGA? Then there would be complaints it's > £100.
Real-time depends on the OS, there are a few to choose from.
2GB looks like a good target for bare metal code for industrial applications and hobby applications like PiStorm.
The RPi isn't for you and me now.
It's for places like nComputing and Avigilon Alta, whose embedded devices are basically RPi's with custom hats.
When those places want an RPi, they are prioritised for stock. You have to wait until some are "gifted" to ThePiHut or similar.
The RPi isn't a hobbyist thing any more, it's a commercial embedded computer that's being used for all sorts, and has been for years.
Those places don't care about more I/O, because they plug in a hat anyway for relays, etc..
Those places don't care about RT, because that's unnecessary for 99% of those kinds of use cases.
Those places don't care about FGPA's.
All they care is that they can still order them for years to come and that the form factor is basically the same.
There's a reason that the foundation is going commercial - they've already sold you out.
During the lockdown supply constraints, the Pi Foundation had a difficult choice: Prioritise consumer or business customers? They took the decision to prioritise business customers. It wasn't an easy decision.
We're now out of the lockdown supply constraints and everyone has equal access to devices.
You aware that not all businesses are "big" business?
And that once a business stops using the Pi because of supply issue, well some of them will fold and never return, others will use a different product and possibly never return.
It wasn't a decision they took lightly, and it makes sense.
"Hobby project that could turn into business and provide jobs?"
Could, yes. But compared against an existing business already providing jobs, it's really not hard to understand why the foundation might have decided that prioritising the latter was the more sensible choice when supply was constrained...
"It's bizarre that people think the rich should always be put in front of the queue because they have profit to make (sorry, low paid jobs to sustain)."
Given the sorts of companies likely to be making use of RPis, I think equating them with the sorts of companies that rely on paying bare minimum wages is a tad deceptive, unless your threshold for "low paid" is somewhat higher than the average person in the street would deem it to be.
"You know that big businesses would do just fine?"
I wonder what your personal experiences of working life during the pandemic were, because there are many of us here who know only too well how difficult life became even for larger companies.
Just a few posts ago you were complaining about them not innovating, now you're complaining about them not being compatible with many devices? You're a tough one to please aren't you. One could be forgiven for thinking you just fancy having a good old whinge every time there's a post about Raspberry Pis.
The 2 GB version was snappy enough but began to exhibit signs of distress as we loaded up multiple applications.
That says more about the application(s) than the platform. You will get problems on any system with the modern bloat containerized full-OS embedded packaging per application.
Optimization is an art that, apparently, has been lost upon us with the advent of too much memory. We expand the software to eat any hardware advances and then some. I wonder how Damn Small Linux would do on a RPI.
"I wonder how Damn Small Linux would do on a RPI"
Quite well, actually. I've gone that route but now stick to the Debian pre-packaged non-GUI rolls in the Raspberry Pi imager. Run them on RPI model B (not B+) and they do what I need, which is admittedly minimal; run an LCD, monitor a few sensors, and display the results.
This is nothing but speculation . . .
The D0 stepping is pitched as a cost reduction, but presumably uses less power too. The current Pi5 runs comparatively hot, and eliminating unnecessary components should allow new hardware to run cooler. This might be a precursor to things like CM5 (I assume industry does not want to add external coolers etc) and the Pi500 everyone assumes is coming (the aluminium plate trick from the 400 might not be enough to cool the original Pi5 hardware).
Could be miles off though . . .
Per the announcement, the silicon removed was
...functionality intended to serve other markets, which we don’t need. This ‘dark silicon’ is permanently disabled in the chips we use...I would be extremely surprised if "permanently disabled" didn't mean "fuses blown in the power lines", which might possibly be confirmed by calling it "dark silicon". So I'd say you're right; there won't be much (if any) difference to the power used and the cost saving is pretty much entirely due to fitting more on a wafer. $10 saved for just two changes - a different SoC and half-sizing the memory - is quite a lot as I see it!
Just out of interest (I have next to no knowledge in this area) I wonder how big the die actually is (and how much has been saved)? The M0+ core as used in the original RP2040 (Pi Pico) is something stupid like 1/100th of a sqmm at 40nm (and of course there are two of them, the RAM, the PIOs, the GPIO, support circuitry etc); the Pi 5 uses an A76 which is presumably quite a lot bigger, despite a smaller process (16nm), but how much for a whole package?
And the obvious follow-on would be that they could start using this new SoC in the 4GB and 8GB versions and maybe bring the cost down slightly (hmmm... yeah).
M.
You point to something interesting.
"Alongside the features required to power a Raspberry Pi, it also contains functionality intended to serve other markets, which we don’t need. This ‘dark silicon’ is permanently disabled in the chips we use, but takes up die space, and therefore adds cost.
The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the bits we need."
In an actual new stepping you don't permanently disable that functionality, you simply remove it. It sounds that this D0 stepping may not be an actual stepping, but only a stepping in namesake. It sounds like a chip binning where some parts of the chip failed but are not needed for RPi5 functionality and are sold as this new D0 "stepping" with uniformly disabling all non RPi functionality, much like an intel F processor likely has a dysfunctional iGPU. It's still there and even might still work but too slow or only a quarter of the execution units and they fused it completely off.
Providing an entirely new mask set, even at those older process nodes, plus going through the validation steps is likely too costly for saving a percentage of the cost of a chip that might only cost a few dollars to produce if they have no other big enough market then RPi for it. On the other hand, if they can sell rejected chips that only lack functionality RPi5 for a small reduction in price rather then throwing them in the bin...
If so, chip area will be identical and power consumption will be very similar to the regular chip, with possibly minimal savings if fusing things off reduces leakage even better then power gating.
Reading some of the comments here complaining about feature X missing/wrong on the RPi 5, I think people need to take a step back and look at the origins of the RPI. It was designed as a very low cost computer for people/children to tinker with - a bit like the 8-bit home micros of the 80s.
Right from the off, people started using it for things it wasn't designed for and asked for more features & performance.
It's now on its fifth iteration, people are still complaining about features & performance, but now they're complaining about price too because its gone up as they've added features & performance that people asked for.
Steam hardware survey from ca 2012 shows 4G ram as most popular, so rpi had 16 times less! And originally out of that tiny ram, only half was usable for the CPU. PCs had 32 times the usable RAM.
Today, Steam hardware survey says most common ram size is 16G. The raspberry Pi has grown from having 32 times less RAM than contemporary PCs, to having half the RAM of contemporary PC.
So it seems to me Raspberry pi is catching up rather than falling behind?
Tell us you don't understand the world of embedded systems engineering, without telling us you don't understand...
In an industry where you can still do genuinely world-beating engineering using processors that would be embarrassed by a home computer from the mid 80s, comparing embedded platforms like this against general purpose consumer grade stuff like smartphones and laptops is always, always, ALWAYS, going to make the latter come out on top. Does that mean there isn't a market for things like the RPi, or the even more pitifully endowed platforms like Arduino? Nope.
As far as my personal experience of the industry goes, I've worked on products where the least powerful ran on an microcontroller with 1KB of flash and zero SRAM (the only volatile storage was provided by the GP registers in the processor core itself), and the most powerful still only provided me with 512KB of flash and 128KB of SRAM.
So whilst I'm also well aware that some embedded systems DO require massively more power than this, moreso even than the most powerful RPi in existence, there are enough differing requirements out there to provide homes for platforms of all sizes, and this idea of yours that a given embedded platform is pointless unless it's comparable to at least an x year old PC/smartphone, is quite simply wrong.
In fairness to their point, they're probably thinking about using a Pi as a desktop, a use case where comparisons to a phone or laptop are more viable as people aren't using either of those for embedded systems (okay, usually not). However, they have to consider that the Pi is not only used as a desktop, and the 2 GB model is the least likely to be used as one.
Even in that case, the Pi 5 is the least likely to fit the complaint. I knew people who would tell you that various Pis worked well as desktops. Back when they were saying that about units with 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM, they weren't convincing, and whenever I asked them about it, it would turn out that they set it up like a desktop, but they didn't actually use it routinely or they used it for one application. The Pi 4 improved this significantly by having larger amounts of RAM so notoriously memory-hungry GUI software on Linux would run well, but the processing and I/O weren't the fastest. Now the Pi 5 has improved both by including a significantly faster CPU and support for SSDs, not just SDs. I don't have a Pi 5, but from the statistics and my experience with the 4, I would expect that many average users could actually successfully use it as a desktop, including multitasking, without yearning to return to something more powerful.
I think (possibly incorrectly) that whilst the hardware is an important aspect of the Pi offering, the ecosystem/community that swarm around a selection of common devices is possibly more valuable.
There are hundreds of Rockchip and N100 devices that exist, and are arguably better value in some circumstances... but the number of Pi devices in circulation, and the size of the community means there's really good support if you need it. You're less likely to get a BIOS/firmware update and ongoing support for the generic RK3588/N100 boards on Ali Express.
That said, I think the more interesting stuff is happening on the Pico/Zero devices - they're the essence of the original Pi.
From TFBlogpost:
BCM2712C1 is a hugely complex and powerful device, with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 application processor running at 2.4GHz, and the latest iteration of the VideoCore multimedia platform. Alongside the features required to power a Raspberry Pi, it also contains functionality intended to serve other markets, which we don’t need. This ‘dark silicon’ is permanently disabled in the chips we use, but takes up die space, and therefore adds cost.
The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the bits we need. From the perspective of a Raspberry Pi user, it is functionally identical to its predecessor: the same fast quad-core processor; the same multimedia capabilities; and the same PCI Express bus that has proven to be one of the most exciting features of the Raspberry Pi 5 platform. However, it is cheaper to make, and so is available to us at somewhat lower cost. And this, combined with the savings from halving the memory capacity, has allowed us to take $10 out of the cost of the finished product.
I'm still running an older Pi model (1? 2?) as a Pi-Hole, and it's hard to beat the long-term value of the $35 I paid for it (I stumped up for the deluxe package with a case, flash drive, and PSU). If other companies are able to compete with the Pi on speed or value, that's great, but it doesn't diminish the remarkable capabilities of the device.
I wouldn't normally bother to comment, but I see that Sergio has returned from stealing washing machines and killing Ukrainian grandmothers to slag the Pi, so I feel moved to defend it.
This was a bit of a negative for the Pi 5 for me, as even though you can get USB headphone socket/sound card dongles, there's always the question of how well the dongle is supported now, and in the future. Built in hardware tends to be supported a bit better. Obviously this is for a media centre/RetroPie setup.
Their first headphone socket was pretty terrible with a lot of interference to the extent that dithering was advisable to turn it from bad to mediocre. I'm not sure if they ever fixed it, and I do have many of the other versions so I could try to find out. However, after trying to use an original Pi's headphone socket for usable audio, I gave up and got used to I2S or USB audio connections. Thus, the loss of the socket in the Pi 5 doesn't concern me because I wasn't using it before.
From your comment, I'm guessing that at some point, they fixed that. However, I'm also wondering whether you can use audio over HDMI? That's always worked in my experience, so if you're using it for a media device using the HDMI interface, can you run audio over that and connect any audio systems to the other end? That should allow more channels than a simple 3.5 mm jack, and most televisions have one of those as well. It hasn't been an option for the kind of things I built, but most of those either have no screen or a small one.
I run piCorePlayer on a couple of Pi3Bs, and they use HDMI as an output. I have no problems playing from my media server or the FLAC stream from Radio Paradise though my Yamaha AV amp.
However, *some* versions of the board don't play very well, and the release notes allude to some issues that others have experienced.
With TV output, I find it's often mumble, mumble, mumble, unless I turn it up to an anti-social 11. With headphones everything seems a lot clearer, with better fidelity. Unfortunately my TV doesn't have a headphone socket, and I don't have blue tooth headphones (but I never worry about needing to charge them though). Gaming with TV audio output can also be anti-socially loud, or too quiet for full enjoyment.
I remember when the Raspberry Pi 1 was first released it didn't have onboard WiFi, so I bought a 3rd party USB WiFi dongle, but that was a lot of hassle as it wasn't widely supported (IIRC). Then the Raspberry Pi Foundation started selling their own USB WiFi dongle, which was better supported.
The great thing about the Raspberry Pi SBC has been the long-lasting OS support for the hardware, in contrast to many other SBCs, but it gets a bit trickier when the hardware is an add on, and supplied by a third party.
I'm actually quite happy with my Pi 4, the USB 3 support and faster (Gigabit?) ethernet are great improvements over previous models, but when I saw the Pi 5 didn't have a headphone socket, I thought that was too big a negative for replacing my current Pi 4 media setup.
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