Raspberry Pi Introduces a 16 GB Pi 5

Last August, Raspberry Pi announced a new entry-level Raspberry Pi5 model with 2 GB of RAM. This past week, it went in the opposite direction. You can now purchase a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB of RAM.

“We first announced Raspberry Pi 5 back in the autumn of 2023, with just two choices of memory density: 4 GB and 8 GB,” Raspberry Pi’s Eben Upton writes in the announcement post. “Last summer, we released the 2 GB variant, aimed at cost-sensitive applications. And today we’re launching its bigger sibling, the 16 GB variant, priced at $120.”

Raspberry Pi has been on a tear since it went public in mid-2024, releasing a flurry of new products in the months since then. The 2 GB and 16 GB variants of the Raspberry Pi 5 are just two of those new releases. But the latter brings the firm’s single-board computer closer than ever to the PC market. And it’s now possible to buy complete NUC form factor PCs with low-end or aging Intel or AMD chipsets at competitive prices that offer a more traditional Windows or Linux experience. (Here is one example.)

But Upton says the Raspberry Pi 5 still makes sense for some audiences.

“We’re continually surprised by the uses that people find for our hardware,” he says. “Many of these fit into 8 GB (or even 2 GB) of SDRAM, but the threefold step up in performance between Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 opens up use cases like large language models and computational fluid dynamics, which benefit from having more storage per core. And while Raspberry Pi OS has been tuned to have low base memory requirements, heavyweight distributions like Ubuntu benefit from additional memory capacity for desktop use cases.”

I’d love to see Microsoft bring full Windows 11 to the Raspberry Pi 5, and this upgrade makes that all the more possible. But again, there are so many NUCs and SFF PCs at low prices now. So the market for such a thing may not exist.

You can buy the 16 GB Raspberry Pi 5 from the company’s partners, as always.