AI/LLMs and distros like Ubuntu stand to benefit

Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB RAM Announced for £115/$120

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Raspberry Pi has today announced the launch of a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB RAM.

A engorged-memory model had been oft-rumoured since the launch of the raspberry Pi 5 in 2024 – and long-desired by fans of this particular single-board computer (SBC).

The launch of the new Raspberry Pi CM5 late last year offers up to 16GB RAM whilst utilising the same underlying chipset as the Pi 5, all but confirming a bumper RAM revision for the full-size board was imminent.

Why didn’t they launch a 16GB model right away? It’s only with last year’s minor revision to the Broadcom BCM2712 application processor (to use D0 stepping) that memories larger than 8GB were supported.

Everything about the Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB LPDDR4 RAM is the same as the 2GB1, 4GB and 8GB models2. Same processor, ports, I/O, etc. But the extra memory costs a premium: the new model retails at £115/$120 – £/$40 more expensive than Raspberry Pi 5 8GB.

Is a Raspberry Pi 16GB worth it?

Those with a lesser-memory model (includes me) shouldn’t feel they’re missing out on anything. In fact, if you’ve never hit an out-of-memory error on a smaller model you’re unlikely to feel the benefit of 16GB.

Most use-cases for a Pi involve streamlined, stripped-down, and optimised software designed for low-power computing. If anything, the memory increase may marginally increase power usage.

Those who use their Pi 5 as a desktop PC are likely to see the additional memory improve multi-tasking, reduce “swappiness”, and boost overall responsiveness (especially if running a web browser with lots of tabs alongside other software).

“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,” as Raspberry Pi’s Eben Upton says.

However, the real appeal of this Raspberry Pi 5 16GB upgrade is will be in AI inferencing, LLMs, VLMs, et al (using Raspberry Pi AI accelerator boards launched last year). Large language models are memory intensive3, so the more memory, the faster the output.

The raw performance is likely to be inline with the 8GB in regular synthetic benchmarking. Those tests won’t pick up on the benefits of 16GB RAM in real-world working, like being able to do more stuff at the same time. AI benchmarks will be interesting though.

Interested?

Raspberry Pi 5 16GB is available to buy as of today from approved Raspberry Pi resellers.

  1. The Raspberry Pi 5 2GB model only launched last year ↩︎
  2. Aforementioned chip revision aside that earlier 4/8GB models didn’t have, but later 2/4/8GB models do ↩︎
  3. Which is why Apple moved to 16GB RAM in its entry-level machines with the roll out of Apple Intelligence ↩︎