Raspberry Pi Launches $50 2GB Model 41
Raspberry Pi, the British computer manufacturer, unveiled a new 2GB variant of its flagship Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer on Monday, priced at $50. Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton said the company aims to "bring high-performance general-purpose computing to the widest possible audience" with the new offering. The 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 utilizes a cost-optimized D0 stepping of the BCM2712 application processor, which removes non-essential functionality to reduce manufacturing costs.
Upton stated the chip is "functionally identical" to users compared to higher-memory variants. While the reduced RAM may limit multitasking capabilities, Raspberry Pi's optimized OS allows for efficient resource usage. The company expects the 2GB model to suffice for many users' needs, while power users may opt for 4GB or 8GB versions priced at $60 and $80 respectively. The Raspberry Pi 5, launched in October 2023, features a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 CPU running at 2.4GHz, dual 4K display output, and support for PCIe SSDs. Upton noted the latest model is "about 150 times as powerful" as the original Raspberry Pi from 2012.
Upton stated the chip is "functionally identical" to users compared to higher-memory variants. While the reduced RAM may limit multitasking capabilities, Raspberry Pi's optimized OS allows for efficient resource usage. The company expects the 2GB model to suffice for many users' needs, while power users may opt for 4GB or 8GB versions priced at $60 and $80 respectively. The Raspberry Pi 5, launched in October 2023, features a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 CPU running at 2.4GHz, dual 4K display output, and support for PCIe SSDs. Upton noted the latest model is "about 150 times as powerful" as the original Raspberry Pi from 2012.
$50? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they'd sell more by making it cheaper, not more powerful.
eg. Who needs that much CPU power when the thing's running off an SD card?
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I'd say $50 is a bargain considering the specs. Buy an ESP8266 if you don't need graphical output, Amazon sells them in a three pack for $16. Mouser has the Pi Zero in stock for $15. If the SD card is the bottleneck in your application then you probably shouldn't be considering the Pi.
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It all depends on the use case.
My question is though no matter what your use case, if the cost difference between 2gb and 4gb is $10, on a non-expandable platform like this I can't imagine going with the $50 version. 2gb Might be massive overkill for whatever you currently have in mind but if you decide to re-use the thing for anything else it might be really constrained. I doubt the power budget goes up all that much to sweep another 2gb of dRAM these days either.
Unless you are doing something that is go
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might be really constrained.
And yet 25 years ago this would have been a supercomputer.
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Yep, my 2002 Mac Quicksilver, the top of the line machine had 2 1 GHz processors and a maximum of 1.5 GB RAM.
It still works, by the way.
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Was just reading about the ongoing development of 3D chip production today in Spectrum (the journal of the IEEE), the writer (a designer) seems confident that we're still a decade or more away from the ending of Moore's Law. Kind of wish that the article had addressed the issue of heat dissipation, as that was being pointed out as an upcoming stumbling block in my readings a couple of years ago, but he didn't.
Re:$50? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, double post.
The reason for going with the cheaper option wouldn't be a hobbyist, it's probably for someone manufacturing a small number of a specialty device. For example if you're going to make 200 fish counters to be deployed on fish ladders by your state's Department of Natural Resources that's a couple hundred dollars off of what would be a very limited budget that you could use for a better camera or other sensor.
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RPi is a pretty good platform for embedding in systems that need relatively complicated processing. For example, I've seen a 3D printer powered by a Pi, and a 2GB unit might make sense for that application.
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They are good as 3D printer frontends. Even with most printers moving to Clipper from Marlin, having OctoPrint as a frontend is nice, just because I can use tools like Obico to watch the print, have video of it being made, easy to pull up an app and stop it via remote, etc.
What I wonder about is if RPi could have a Raspberry Pi with a built in Pi Pico on board. This sounds odd, but there are a lot of tasks a MCU can handle quickly and in real time, while other items which need more CPU and are a lot more
Okay (Score:1)
Re:$50? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's because rPI became the ubiquitous "random project needs compute" box. They're the Kleenex of SBC even though most projects don't actually need one.
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>It's because rPI became the ubiquitous "random project needs compute" box.
Yeah, I have 2 or 3 of them lying around because they seemed like a good idea at the time, but I replaced them with mini desktops and I couldn't even tell you where they are now. Every once in a while I think I'll use one for something and by the time I've got it half set up I think of a better choice.
Too much capability to throw away, not enough to use. At least for the projects I've come up with.
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Maybe they'd sell more by making it cheaper, not more powerful.
They do still offer some cheaper, lower-spec options. Catch is, they've raised the prices on those a bit too due to inflation. I have a Pi Zero W that I've used for the past several years to smarten some "dumb" multi-mode Christmas spotlights. At today's prices, I'm not sure I'd have bothered.
The higher-end Pis certainly do seem a bit more niche than they used to be in years past, since there's a lot of use cases where they're nowhere near the best bang for your buck anymore. A used PC will provide a mu
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I wind up booting from a USB SSD. Mainly because SD cards, even "industrial" SD cards wear out, while a SSD that has been overprovisioned by about 20% can last a while as it has more spare cells to wear level over.
The CPU power does come in handy, just because the OS and apps are not going to get any smaller. Of course, it would be nice to have 16-32 gigs of RAM because the need for RAM tends to be quite useful for I/O caching and minimizing writes to the SD or SSD.
Re:$50? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe they'd sell more by making it cheaper, not more powerful.
Why would they make the Pi 5 cheaper and less powerful when they have a cheaper and less powerful product on sale? You know the 4, the 3B+ and the Zero W are all currently on the market right? If you don't want a powerful board, buy those instead.
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You have a 1GB RAM drive?
Modern SD cards can be pretty fast anyway.
But you have a point.
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"cheaper, not more powerful"
Since integrated circuits are largely NRE, a less powerful part won't necessarily be cheaper if you're the only one buying it.
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You realize of course that the original Raspberry Pi was $25 (about $35 in today's money) and had 256 MB of RAM and a processor that was far slower than the ones in the Raspberry Pi 5? So $15 more for a processor that's (according to the summary) 150 times faster and has 4x the RAM? Seems like a bargain to me.
Also of note that the Pi 5 is not your only option as you can still pick up the Pi 4 which is about half the speed or the Pi 3 which is slower still but still perfectly functional and still in that $25
Stock OS direct boot from SSD (Score:4, Insightful)
My interest in the Pi and Pi-alike boards has waned significantly over recent years due to the requirements to boot from (m)SD or eMMC, with each board apparently requiring some arcane build of U-boot to make it happen (and no two alike). In my experience, the only OSes that really work on these boards are the ones that come from the board makers (respins of Ubuntu, usually), but that add their own repos in .in or .cn - where lord knows what's going on. No thanks.
My interest in these Arm boards will increase again if/when it becomes common that you can slap a SATA or NVMe SSD of your choice onto the board, and install a stock *nix distribution (i.e. from the makers of the distro - Debian, OpenBSD, etc). Of course, I ain't holding my breath...
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You can run stock Fedora Linux (I'm assuming others as well) on the Pi 3 and 4 (5 is still a WIP I believe), as well as several other ARM SBCs. The Pi 5 has an m.2 slot available on a hat (the base board now has PCIe, basically just need the hat to add the connector). Pi 4 can boot from a USB 3 device (so SSD or even hard drive if you choose) as well.
Pretty much all ARM boards need a specific build of U-Boot - somewhat like how you can't load a BIOS for one x86_64 motherboard model on another (just rather
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My interest in these Arm boards will increase again if/when it becomes common that you can slap a SATA or NVMe SSD of your choice onto the board
Why do I have the feeling that as soon as this happens you'll complain about the price.
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Jeff Geerling blog [slashdot.org]
Particularly with the Pi5, with its exposed PCIe slot, there are numerous NVMe PiHATs available that allow for many setup options.
As for distros: Raspberry Pi OS is Debian-derived and pulls from the same package libraries. You can configure it to pull from elsewhere if you like. It’s true that other distros may or may not work out of the box. This is true
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IIRC, Raspberry Pis use ThreadX to bootstrap Linux. It would be nice if they could use a variant of ARM UEFI, and all the SoC drivers would not just be open source, but mainlined into the Linux kernel.
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My interest in these Arm boards will increase again if/when it becomes common that you can slap a SATA or NVMe SSD of your choice onto the board, and install a stock *nix distribution (i.e. from the makers of the distro - Debian, OpenBSD, etc). Of course, I ain't holding my breath...
Oh, for the love of.... Raspberry Pi Debian images [debian.net], NVMe boot is a thing [tomshardware.com], and Jeff Geerling made a few tests with SATA. [jeffgeerling.com]
About the only thing you can't boot on a RPI5 at the moment is Debian, but that's simply due to them not wanting to use the raspberrian kernel. OpenSUSE is busy getting the support in to the mainline kernel [phoronix.com], so maybe hold your breath for a year and check back if that one limitation is too much for you.
-40C (Score:2)
I wish they made a -40C version of their compute modules. Currently -20C only.
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I wish they made a -40C version of their compute modules. Currently -20C only.
Just run a BTC mining process in the background. You'll probably never mine anything, but it'll generate enough heat to keep the board warm.
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As always, the problem with -40C is startup. Industrial equipement may not be running 24/7. If they shutdown for a couple hours, they need to be able to start again.
Also, the CPU may generate heat, but I doubt the rest of the board will get close to -20C if the ambient temperature is -40C.
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Pi price point (Score:3)
Last year we were looking for a solution for digital signage, and were looking at the Pis, but ended up going for refurbished compact PCs. I think it was a âoeLenovo ThinkCentre M93pâ. The problem we found with the Pi, is that by the time you factor in storage, case and power adapter they were actually more expensive that these PCs.
The PCs were also sufficiently small for our needs.
Iâ(TM)d like to take another look at the Pi in the future, but right now they just arenâ(TM)t feasible for us.
Re: Pi price point (Score:2)
Re: Pi price point (Score:2)
I wouldnâ(TM)t go so far as saying it is a scam, just that if your goal isnâ(TM)t hobby level for the regular model (where you need to play directly with electronics) or embedded with the compute, then there are likely better alternatives for a given scenario. The Pi is also likely good if you need to keep power usage low.
I do have a Pi at home, as media server, using an external USB hard drive. This fits the hobbyâ(TM)ish usage scenario, where I use to experiment with concepts.
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If you're doing digital signage why aren't you custom-building boards that carry the Pi Zero, Pico or Compute Module and doing it all inside your own case? Or are you saying that you were looking for a computer to connect to an HDMI screen to just display something? Even then the cost is minimal if you're doing it right.
Even if you needed built-in networking then a Zero 2 W would probably have been far more than sufficient, has HDMI output and more than enough power for what you were looking for. I make the
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In our scenario, it was using something off the shelf, without needing to tinker with the hardware. We are more software focused. A power socket is available and the screens are using HDMI. Also, we were having to deal with limited budget and time lines.
Our software stack is nix-os, with chrome in kiosk mode.
I’m always looking to see how to evolve things. The main requirement right now is to be able to play 1920x1080 videos. We have resisted requests for 4K video for now, mainly because of resource de