Released less than a year ago, the Raspberry Pi 5 has become very popular among single-board computing fans and Linux ARM enthusiasts thanks to its increased power, memory, and PCIe bus for expansion.
However, until now the Raspberry Pi 5 was only available in two variants: a $60/£57 model with 4GB of RAM and an $80/£77 model with 8GB of RAM.
Enough memory for resource-intensive workloads (like running a full Ubuntu desktop), but not everyone needs or wants that much memory at the higher cost for simpler projects.
That’s why a new base model of Raspberry Pi with 2GB of RAM was announced today for $50/£47.
The 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 also features a “cost-optimized” Broadcom BCM2712D0 SoC. It is “functionally identical” to the BCM2712C1 used in the other Pi 5 models, but cheaper to manufacture.
“(The C1 version) contains features intended for other markets that we don’t need. This ‘dark silicon’ is permanently disabled in the chips we use, but takes up space on the chip and therefore increases the cost,” says Eben UptonFounder of Raspberry Pi.
“The new D0 stepping removes all the functionality we don’t need and leaves only the parts we need. From a Raspberry Pi user’s perspective, it is functionally identical to its predecessor (and) is cheaper to manufacture and therefore available to us at a slightly lower cost.”
Apart from reduced RAM, an optimized SoC and a lower price, there are no other differences to the slightly more expensive Raspberry Pi 5 models. The same ports, the same pins, the same connectors, the same speeds – and the same fun!
So is it worth saving $10 for less RAM?
It depends on what you want to use Pi for.
For hobbyist, industrial, IoT and edge computing use cases, 2GB may be more than enough, and for vintage and retro gaming (up to the PS1), 2GB should be enough as most popular handhelds with ARM processors have a maximum of 1GB!
But anyone who plans to put their Pi through its paces—such as editing media on an Ubuntu desktop, driving a 4K display, compiling code from source, or sloppily keeping a hundred browser tabs open—will find the $10-20 extra for more RAM is worth it.
The Raspberry Pi 5 with 2 GB RAM is now available from authorized Pi retailers (at RRP/RRP), such as Pishop.us in the United States, The Pi Hut in Great Britain, e2u in India, Welectron In Germany and other countries, unauthorized resellers may charge higher prices.
