Raspberry Pi 5 is now available with 16GB of RAM (for $120)

The Raspberry Pi 5 is now available with up to 16GB of RAM. That’s the good news. The less good news is that it’s priced at $120.

That puts the new Raspberry Pi 16GB perilously close to the price of a decent mini PC with an Intel Alder Lake-N or Twin Lake processor.

There are still some reasons to consider spending money on a Raspberry Pi 5 instead of an Intel-powered PC. It’s a credit card-sized, low-power computer that can be used for a wide range of applications. You can use one as a media center, file server, retro game console, or general purpose PC with a Linux-based operating system. It can be used as the brains for all sorts of DIY hardware projects. And they’ve been widely adopted in educational and industrial settings.

But it’s easier to make the case that a Raspberry Pi 5 is work the asking price when you’re looking at cheaper models: the 2GB version sells for $50. A Raspberry Pi with 4GB of RAM is $60. And the 8GB model is $80.

For $120 you can choose between a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board PC without a case and with 16GB of RAM and a 2.4 GHz BCM2712 quad-core ARM Cortex-A76 processor or spending a few dollars more to pick up a full-fledged computer with a faster processor, at least 8GB of RAM, an SSD, case, power supply, and Windows software (although most GNU/Linux distributions should also be supported).

That said, Raspberry Pi notes that there are people who have been running higher-performance workloads on Raspberry Pi systems who would benefit from additional memory. For example it’s possible to run larger LLM (large language models) and computational fluid dynamics on a Raspberry PI 5 with 16GB of RAM than one with less memory. The extra memory should also help with heavy duty multitasking or running more demanding Linux distros like Ubuntu.

via Raspberry Pi and Jeff Geerling