A cheaper slice of pi: The Raspberry Pi 5 family growing by one. Founder Eben Upton has introduced a new version of the popular single board computer for those not planning on running memory-intensive applications. The 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 is built on a cost-optimized D0 stepping of the BCM2712, a 16nm application processor from Broadcom. Upton said the new stepping strips out all of the “dark silicon” found on earlier models – functionality intended for other markets that has been permanently disabled but still takes up die space.
By removing the unused hardware and shipping the board with 2GB of RAM instead of 4GB, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was able to cut end-user costs – from $60 down to $50. From the perspective of a Pi 5 user, the new board is functionally identical to the original save for cutting the amount of memory in half.
The BCM2712 is a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 application processor clocked at 2.4GHz, and it includes the latest version of the VideoCore multimedia platform.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the Pi 5 near the end of 2023, and has been working hard on supporting hardware ever since.
This past May, the foundation introduced a budget-friendly $12 M.2 add-on board. A month later, we got a $70 AI add-on kit that combined the M.2 HAT+ with a Hailo-8L artificial intelligence accelerator module. According to the specs, the AI hardware can deliver 13 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of inferencing performance, freeing up the main application processor for other jobs.
In July, the Linux kernel – which is used by most Pi-compatible operating systems including the official Raspberry Pi OS – received a pair of patches including a simple implementation of NUMA (non-uniform memory access) emulation for arm64 platforms. Geekbench 6 testing revealed a six percent uplift in single-core performance and up to an 18 percent improvement in the multi-core test with NUMA emulation.
The 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 should be available from approved resellers very soon, with pricing set at $50.
