Introduced in September 2023, the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer was initially available in two variants: with 4 and 8 GB of RAM. Last summer, the British developer supplemented the line with a budget version of 2 GB for projects where there is an opportunity to save money. The new model in the series, on the contrary, offers to roam with 16 GB of RAM.
Image source: raspberrypi.com
The Raspberry Pi company noted that they themselves continue to discover new scenarios for using single-board computers by customers. In most cases, 4 or 8 GB of RAM is enough, sometimes 2 GB is enough; but Raspberry Pi 5 has three times the performance of Raspberry Pi 4, allowing single board computers to be used in new scenarios. Today, they even run large artificial intelligence language models and computational fluid dynamics applications—they run faster as the amount of RAM per core increases.
The Raspberry Pi OS platform is optimized for minimal memory consumption, but desktop distributions, including Ubuntu, need more of it. Therefore, the manufacturer installed an updated version of the Broadcom BCM2712 processor with support for more than 8 GB of RAM on the new Raspberry Pi 5. And Micron offered a chip with eight 16 Gbit LPDDR4X crystals, which gave a total of 16 GB in one package.
The recommended retail price for the updated Raspberry Pi 5 was $120.