The Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB of memory is now available, as announced by the British foundation responsible for this development, which if in its beginnings pursued the promotion of computer science teaching to schoolchildren, its low cost and enormous flexibility has made it in a product tremendously popularleading the market for single board computers (SBC) for use in countless projects, both personal and professional, commercial, industrial and educational system.
The foundation shipped the Raspberry Pi 5 in fall 2023, with just two memory options: 4GB and 8GB. Last summer, they launched the 2 GB variant aimed at more cost-sensitive applications and now they are launching with a bigger sister that doubles the amount of memory to 16 Gbytes.
Raspberry Pi 5 con 16 GB
The new version will be welcome for a good part of customers. RAM is a main hardware component and in today’s world, given the increased requirements of many projects, having a sufficient amount is essential. They quote professional applications such as those related to large language models and computational fluid dynamics, which benefit from having more storage per core.
Although the Raspberry Pi OS system has been tuned to have low base memory requirements, heavyweight distributions like Ubuntu benefit from additional memory capacity for desktop use cases. The Broadcom BCM2712 SoC includes support for memory larger than 8 GB and the Micron engineers who supply the memory have been able to manufacture a package with eight 16 Gbit LPDDR4X chips, making it possible for the first time a Raspberry Pi product with 16 GB.
The rest of the specifications are the known ones, starting with the SoC de Broadcom based on a 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A76 running at 2.4 GHz and including 4 MB of cache. The GPU is a VideoCore VII, which supports APIs such as OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2.
In addition to the increased performance, the SoC includes a new I/O chip designed by Raspberry Pi engineers: the RP1. This dedicated chip acts as a Southbridge and handles most of the data input/output, including the GPIO and USB pins, taking the load off the main processor. The result is that the Raspberry Pi 5 can run up to three times faster than a Pi 4.
Of course, it has a great connectivity for its sizeamong others, Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0; Gigabit Ethernet with PoE+ support; 2 × 4 lane MIPI display/camera transceivers; high-speed microSD card; USB ports or a standard 40-pin GPIO connector.
The Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB is now available from the foundation’s retail partners for $120.
