Raspberry Pi 5 now has a cheaper version fans have demanded

The Raspberry Pi 5 microcomputer can now be nabbed at an even more affordable price.

The new variant drops the RAM to 2GB of RAM and drops the price to $50. Previous variants had contained 4GB and 8GB of RAM for $60 and $80 respectively. In the UK, you can grab all three from The Pi Hut for £38.83, £48, and £64.

The foundation has decided to drop the entry price farther, for those who want plenty of power from their Pi but lack the need to run labour intensive applications.

Raspberry Pi foundation boss Eben Upton says the new version of the computer, which launched late last year, continues the mission to “bring high-performance general-purpose computing to the widest possible audience.”

The new variant will have what Upton calls a “cost-optimised D0 stepping” of the 16nm Broadcom BCM2712 processor based upon a 2.4GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A76. To help optimise the cost, Raspberry Pi has dropped what it calls ‘dark silicon’, which is disabled for consumer use but serves “other markets”. This has made the 2GB version cheaper to make.

In a blog post Upton adds: “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.”

The company also says its innovations courtesy of the Raspberry Pi OS has enabled optimisations that enable the hardware to work smarter rather than harder. The 2GB Raspberry Pi 5, which the company says is around 150 times more powerful than the original, groundbreaking microcomputer is available now.