There's a new Raspberry Pi 5, costing just $50. This price reduction has been achieved by cutting memory to 2MB, plenty for most applications, and eliminating the "dark silicon" that takes up space and adds to the cost of the two existing variants of the Pi 5.

When the Raspberry Pi 5 was launched in October 2023 there were two options - the 8GB costing $80 and the 4GB variant costing $60. Now there's a lower-cost option in response to consumer demand.

In his announcement of the 2GB Raspberry Pi 5, Eben Upton states:

Raspberry Pi 5 is on the order of 150 times as powerful as the original Raspberry Pi that we launched back in 2012. Much of that performance increase comes from clever engineering, from the economies of scale that result from building millions of computers a year, and from the continued operation of Moore’s Law.

Upton goes on to say that some components of the design have  become more expensive. So it comes as a pleasant surprise that it has been possible to produce a new variant of the Pi 5 that is functionally identical to its predecessor, with the same fast quad-core processor, the same multimedia capabilities and the same PCI Express bus, but with $10 lopped off the price tag.

Cutting down the memory to 2MB accounts for some cost saving but so does the fact this this variant is built on a cost-optimized D0 stepping of the BCM2712, the Broadcom chip that is one of the two key chips of the Pi 5 - the other being the RP1 I/O controller developed by Raspberry Pi and based on the chip used in the Pico. The D0 stepping strips away unneeded functionality allowing the chip to be small and more economical. 

Upton also points out that having a custom operating system, Raspberry Pi OS, is a factor that has allowed Raspberry Pi to  deliver a better user experience on devices with less memory and processing power so that many users will find that the new, lower-cost variant works perfectly well for their use cases.   

• Harry Fairhead has a hardware background having worked with microprocessors and electronics in general, for many years. He is the author of books on the Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Pico in the context of IOT in C and Python/MicroPython. Raspberry Pi IOT in C, 3rd Ed, Raspberry Pi IoT in C with Linux Drivers, 2nd Ed,Raspberry Pi IOT in Python with GPIO Zero, 2nd Ed, and Raspberry Pi IoT In Python Using Linux Drivers, 2nd Ed cover the Raspberry Pi 5. 

More Information

2GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $50

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