New Flavor of Pi? Raspberry Pi 5 2GB

Introducing the 2GB Raspberry Pi 5

Raspberry Pi 5 2GB built on a cost-optimised D0 stepping of the BCM2712 application processor, and priced at just $50.

In what could be called a "Good Monday Morning", Raspberry Pi have excitedly release the Raspberry Pi 5 2GB. Priced at just $50, the new 2GB variant continues their "mission to bring high-performance general-purpose computing to the widest possible audience" - Even Upton. 

This addition to the lineup adds a sweet point of value and power to the rest of the utility onboard. 

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. 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.

How did they do it?

Eben Upton from Raspberry Pi says:

"The 4GB and 8GB variants of Raspberry Pi 5 are built around two key chips: the RP1 I/O controller, developed here at Raspberry Pi and providing the interfacing capabilities of the platform; and BCM2712C1, a 16nm application processor built by our friends at Broadcom.

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."

What will you use your Raspberry Pi 5 2GB for? 

With more news coming from the Raspberry Pi camp about their  Raspberry Pi RP2350 Dual Arm Cortex-m33 and Dual RISC-V Hazard3 Chipset where will this take Raspberry Pi in the Future?