The Raspberry Pi 5 is the latest in a series of tinker-friendly single-board computers (SBCs). It was introduced at the end of 2023 at a slightly higher price than the Pi 4, which understandably made some people unhappy. Now, not quite a year after the original launch, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has introduced a cheaper version.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is now available with 2GB of RAM at a price of $50. Previously, the 4GB model was the cheapest at $60 and there is also the 8GB model at $80. Getting less RAM makes this variant cheaper, but that’s not all.
Broadcom didn’t design the BCM2712 chipset specifically for Raspberry Pi, it sells it to other companies too. This means that the silicon has features that these other companies need but the Pi does not – even so, these features take up space on the silicon die and that drives up the price.
However, Broadcom has now come up with a new stepping (D0), which cuts those extra bits out, making the chipset a bit cheaper. This plus the lower amount of RAM has enabled the Foundation to deliver the 2GB model at $50. Whether the 4GB and 8GB models switch to the new stepping remains to be seen (current boards use the C1 stepping).
The BCM2712 is a 16nm chip with four Cortex-A76 cores (normally running at 2.4GHz) and a VideoCore VII GPU, plus other elements like a PCIe 2.0 x1 bus, which has enabled more advanced applications for the Pi 5 – for example, if you build a NAS with it, storage no longer has to be attached to the USB 3.0 port.
🚨 A new member joins the Raspberry Pi 5 family 🚨
With 2GB of RAM, and priced at just $50, this new entry-level product continues our mission to reduce the cost of high-performance general-purpose computing.
Read me: https://t.co/2WAJIC9Qh2 pic.twitter.com/lVDHpWXsZv
— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) August 19, 2024
In addition to the BCM2712, the Pi 5 also has an RP1 chip, which is developed by Raspberry itself and enables features that make the Pi a Pi, e.g. the 40-pin header. The RP1 is also responsible for Ethernet, USB, the display and camera ports and more.
