Raspberry Pi 5 2GB Launches At $50 USD

To date the Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer has been offered with either 4GB or 8GB of system memory. The Raspberry Pi 5 4GB has retailed for $60 USD while the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB at $80 USD. For those needing something a little cheaper and not needing as much system memory, the Raspberry Pi 5 2GB model launched today.

Eben Upton announced the availability of the Raspberry Pi 5 2GB for $50 USD, which is $10 less than the 4GB model. Besides halving the amount of RAM of the base model, the Raspberry Pi 5 2GB uses a new "D0" stepping to the Broadcom BCM2712 SoC.

Upton explained of the new Broadcom BCM2712 D0 stepping that it eliminates some dark silicon that goes unused by the Raspberry Pi boards but ultimately impacts the die space/pricing and is now eliminated with this new stepping:

"BCM2712C1 is a hugely complex and powerful device, with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 application processor running at 2.4GHz, and the latest iteration of the VideoCore multimedia platform. Alongside the features required to power a Raspberry Pi, it also contains functionality intended to serve other markets, which we don’t need. 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. From the perspective of a Raspberry Pi user, it is functionally identical to its predecessor: the same fast quad-core processor; the same multimedia capabilities; and the same PCI Express bus that has proven to be one of the most exciting features of the Raspberry Pi 5 platform. However, it is cheaper to make, and so is available to us at somewhat lower cost. And this, combined with the savings from halving the memory capacity, has allowed us to take $10 out of the cost of the finished product."

Just 2GB of RAM for this quad-core ARM single board computer will yield some memory pressure for those wanting to use it as a conventional Linux desktop, but this $50 Raspberry Pi 5 may work out for some embedded use-cases and others not needing a desktop and memory hungry apps.

Besides the reduced RAM and different Broadcom SoC stepping, the rest of the Raspberry Pi 5 2GB single board computer remains the same. This new SBC version goes on sale today.

More details on the 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 at RaspberryPi.com.