Let them eat Pi: RAM shortage bumps Raspberry prices as much as $60 That slice of Pi is getting much more expensive. Everyone’s favorite single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi, is jumping up in price again, with increases ranging from $10 to $60, depending on how much memory your board has. After boosting prices in December due to rising memory costs, Raspberry Pi has moved to do so again as …
From their press release:
"We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again: the current situation is ultimately a temporary one, and we look forward to unwinding these price increases once it abates."
I actually have my doubts. Not in their intention to reduce prices when possible, but in the current situation being temporary.
When that bubble bursts there's going to be a lot of slack manufacturing capacity, unsold stock and even surplus stuff installed, some of it possibly in DCs that weren't even turned on because they didin't get a grid connection.
And even at best memory prices have a habit of being cyclic - high prices, build out production - glut - close fabs - shortage - high prices.
> high prices, build out production - glut - close fabs - shortage - high prices.
On this time scale it's not even build fabs, but redirect wafers to more profitable parts, or even more profitable higher performance ram.
So when it all crashes we should be able to ramp production of regular ram back up in few months
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as I read elsewhere recently: The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.
That has been happening for several years at this point - PC's at homes are becoming far less common - PC's only tend to be used by such sort at work.
Many still have laptops, but most want to get rid of those and only have demon rectangles (even though a touchscreen-only input can only barely handle doom-scrolling, which I suspect will be a problem the next time the government wants to roll out the next proprietary struggle session and it can't really be completed on a touchscreen).
If it makes less people decide to purchase a Pi, the price of the Pi rising isn't necessarily a bad thing.
After all, the Pi runs proprietary Broadcom software, including a proprietary master OS on the VPU - so it is not good for the users freedom.
Now if only there was a SBC available that respected the users freedom without caveats that I could suggest instead; https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers
That old and compllety out of date chestnut. The Pi 5 has almost no code running on the VPU at all - almost everything is now on the Arm side and open source, a deliberate effort by RP to get away from closed source code. The only remaining stuff is the bootloader, which gets the RAM up and running and boots the kernel, and some power/temperature management. Also worth noting that Raspberry Pi wrote most of that firmware (on all models), not Broadcom. So its actual Raspberry Pi proprietry, not Broadcom.
Why do people still think this stuff? Its been nearly 14 YEARS since the Pi1 was launched - stuff changes!
The changes made in the last 5 years has been, for any component released as free software, to increase the size of the proprietary software to bigger than that to compensate?
Although, most of it is now stored on a SPI flash chip, instead of the microsd card.
The current category is correct for all Pi models (models after 3B have no librerpi support at all) and it has been correct since 2021, as pretty much nothing has changed with SBC's since then (there's no point updating a page if nothing has changed).
Why do people still think this stuff? Its been nearly 14 YEARS since the Pi1 was launched - stuff changes!
Same reason they keep using names like "Raspberry Pi Foundation" (with respect to device development and sales) and "Raspbian" that are years out of date. Because they are lazy, they read something on the internet and they parrot it because being sanctimonious about something they haven't a clue about makes them feel better about their sad lives.
Until now, I've never written "Raspberry Pi Foundation".
Before making any claim, I thoroughly investigate it - too bad I neglected to fully document my past investigation and thus I need to do it again.
But, I really can't be bothered to do so again, unless someone bothers to provide evidence that the Pi is now free (nobody can, as it isn't).
It's amazing how common it is for people who have no clue at all, to claim I don't have a clue.
Actually, I can be bothered after all.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberry-pi.html#eeprom-boot-flow
"Since Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi flagship devices use an EEPROM bootloader. The main difference between these and previous products is that the second-stage bootloader is loaded from SPI flash EEPROM instead of the bootcode.bin file used on previous products."
`git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/`
If you inspect the software, you'll notice there is no source code and there are 2 binaries, one 2MiB & 100k - which is far larger than the original bootcode.bin (https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/blob/master/boot/bootcode.bin?raw=true - reported to be 51.4 KB without me downloading it).
There's some padding of the EEPROM image to 2MiB, but the program inside is compressed, so I reckon it's at least 0.5MiB or likely a little over 1MiB.
51.4KiB goes in ~0.5MiB-1MiB 10-20 times, so the amount of the proprietary software is around 10-20x larger, not a reduction!
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/refs/heads/master/LICENSE
Even if the source code was available, it'll still be proprietary, as; "This software may only be used for the purposes of developing for, running or using a Raspberry Pi device."
I checked the Pi 5 and the size of the proprietary software is now larger than ever before - although most of it is now instead stored on a SPI chip that come on the Pi.
You just described what the proprietary software does on all the Pi's.
Power/temperature management needs ongoing execution to work, therefore the same problem of there being a proprietary master OS still exists - whether it runs on the VPU or actually another processor is mostly irrelevant.
There's clearly no excuse as to why *any* of the software is still proprietary, if RPi wrote most of it.
Lots of "statements of intent" but very few actual contracts. It's almost like someone is bumping stock prices up for some very strange unfathomable reason that certainly has nothing to do with with some soft of pump and dump before the inevitable "Where profit?" crash.
Personally I really don't understand it. Let's say I'm an investor and I've got a large amount of money to invest. My most important questions are "When do I get my investment back?", "Wil it make me a profit?" and "What are my guarantees?/What's the probability of profit?". OpenAI has revenues of 20bn and they are talking about investments in 2026 of another 640bn. That's without taking out the running costs from the 20bn. The math is not mathing. At least with the dot com bubble you could see a genuine use case for the internet. Where would your average person need AI?
That's why there are so many people who lie about what AI does. If LLMs do what they actually do, then it becomes clear that it will never make anywhere near the money it promises to. But if LLMs can replace lots of people's jobs, then you could get a little less than what all those companies were giving those workers, and that could easily exceed the investment being made this year. It can't replace so many jobs, but if investors think it can, they'll keep paying until the end. Combine that with a lot of people who aren't investors but think it can replace jobs for some other reason* and you've got plenty of noise supporting investors' confidence that this is the perfect investment for the long-term investor because they think it's guaranteed to make massive profits and they have to wait a few years. That's also the perfect investment for the fraudster because now they have a few years to take as much as they can before it collapses.
* There seem to be several reasons for people to assume AI can do everything, even if they aren't personally investors in it. Some of them seem to be:
1. They want to have AI do their work, so AI must be able to do so so they're not being unprofessional.
2. They want to not have to do work at all, so if AI takes all the jobs and they need to set up something else, then AI must be capable of doing it.
3. They want to hate someone, and if AI took all the jobs, then the people making money off the AI would be easily despised. It seems like you could hate someone, even the same people, for better reasons, but still.
4. They want something to exist which doesn't, they don't think it would happen without AI, so if AI was able to make it, then they would get what they want. This is the vibe-coders' position, in my experience. People want a piece of software, nobody's writing it for them, so they are sure that the next run of the AI code generation will compile to the thing they imagined.
Simple solution.
If RAM is so much of a problem, why not recycle it?
I've examined this option, a lot of 'broken' smart phones even if the SOC is toast can be harvested with very basic skills.
Though it might not be as reliable, the environmental gains of a recycled RAM chip are considerable.
Solder it on with low temperature solder so the chip doesn't get stressed, and integrate a test into the boot sequence
so if something does go wrong then at least it is obvious where the problem lies.
Maybe add a 'Recycled' tag and a special green and yellow PCB so folks know what they are getting.
Personal note, I have a few spare ICs here from broken Pi's purchased for 'Repair' .. :-)
I am fairly sure that there are factories in China doing exactly that, just without telling anyone its actually recycled. If you look on Aliexpress you can buy what are listed as 'new' SD-RAM and DDR2 RAM modules which fabs stopped producing new years ago. And there are way more available than what would just be left over NOS.
Quite possible. Often wonder where all those suspiciously new looking 'BGA Flash' chips came from.
I think most of them are somehow wiped because GDPR would have a field day if not.
Note here that iDevices and most others encrypt their storage, so likely they just get minimally erased and sent on their merry way.
Did also read that some brand new USB sticks have had traces of remanent data on them, the ones sold as '4GB' sometimes have
16GB physical chips or sometimes larger but evidently one of the internal ICs in the stack went bad so they get disabled at the factory.
Somewhat newer '3D V-NAND' if they fail in TLC/QLC mode are simply programmed to write in single bit and are often fine thereafter.
while PI is nice to start with or for things like HA or a quick turn DIY solution, anyone serious about embedded hardware development wont use a PI or its hardware. other brand dev kits are less expensive and have more features and are build for industrial stability. PI has its niche, but there it stops, and its not the affordable platform anymore for developers.
What is the replacement you suggest? In my experience, most SBCs that are competitive on price and specs are not built for industrial stability; they get stuck with things like custom kernels which become maintenance problems, driver gaps which mean not everything works even years after they're released, or they're not always available which would be a big problem if you relied on them for a commercial product. Meanwhile, most of the things I know that are good for industrial uses are a lot more expensive, and while they tend to be better on software support, sometimes similar gaps show up.
There is plenty I don't like about the Raspberry Pi, but long-term software and hardware support is one of its strengths and, until now, they have been rather cheap.
Rubbish, as Pi sales figures show. 70% of Pis are sold to industrial or commercial customers, for lots of reasons. High quality HW, actual software support, long production dates, decent pricing. Loads of stuff sold to people to put in their own products, its a very cost effective way of getting processing power and control into a device. Lots of DIN rail mounted machine control/monitoring stuff is implemented using Pi for example (Revolution PI, Berghoff automation, OnLogic and many many more). Come to the Pi stand at Embedded world (Nurnberg, Germany) in March, and take a look, plenty of examples on hand.
Worth noting that Pi are not alone in having to put up prices - all the other SBC people will have to do the same, and given their much lower sales figures, they will struggle more with pricing.
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