Raspberry Pi 5 Gets a Memory-Reduced Variant, New SoC Stepping — and a $10 Entry-Level Price Cut

Raspberry Pi has announced a new model in its flagship Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer family, taking all the features of the current models but cutting the memory to just 2GB — and, combined with a new cost-reduced stepping of the system-on-chip at the board's heart, slashing the price to $50.

"Raspberry Pi 5 is on the order of 150 times as powerful as the original Raspberry Pi that we launched back in 2012," claims Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton of the latest in the Raspberry Pi single-board computer family. "But as we’ve continued to reach for performance, some components of the design have inevitably become more expensive. Until now, the lowest-cost Raspberry Pi 5 was the 4GB variant, priced at $60. Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of the 2GB Raspberry Pi 5, built on a cost-optimized D0 stepping of the BCM2712 application processor, and priced at just $50."

The BCM2712, a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 system-on-chip designed by Broadcom, retains the same specifications in its new "cost-optimized" D0 variant — losing, Upton says, only features that were never actually used. "[The chip] also contains functionality intended to serve other markets, which we don't need," he says of the earlier steppings. "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."

To the end user, the difference should be unnoticeable: all the functionality of earlier steppings available to users is still present, and everything still runs at the same speed. All it means is that the new version costs less to make — and while there has been no word yet on using that same cost-reduced stepping to lower the price of other models in the range, the savings have allowed Raspberry Pi to build a budget-friendly variant, which halves the previously smallest available RAM capacity to 2GB while cutting $10 from the retail pricing.

"One of the many advantages of building our own operating system, Raspberry Pi OS, is that we get to focus on optimizing resource usage," Upton adds of software compatibility. "When running on modern hardware, the practical result has been a modern operating system with a dramatically lighter resource footprint than most general-purpose Linux distributions. So, while our most demanding users — who want to drive dual 4Kp60 displays, or open a hundred browser tabs, or compile complex software from source — will probably stick with the existing higher memory-capacity variants of Raspberry Pi 5, many of you will find that this new, lower-cost variant works perfectly well for your use cases."

The new Raspberry Pi 5 2GB is now available at all Raspberry Pi resellers , priced at $50; the Raspberry Pi 4GB remains at $60, for those needing additional memory.