This may sound like an April Fool’s joke, but the Raspberry Pi 4 with 3GB RAM is real and now offered for $83.75. Raspberry Pi also announced another round of price increase for Raspberry Pi 4/5/CM4/CM5 due to a “seven-fold increase over the last year in the price of [the] LPDDR4 DRAM“.
As far as I know, 3GB LPDDR4 chips do NOT exist or are very rare, so the new SBC likely relies on the Raspberry Pi 4 dual RAM PCB variant introduced last month, and features two 1.5GB LPDDR4 chips for a total of 3GB of RAM.
Apart from the memory capacity, nothing else changes. If you are still skeptical, you’ll find the Raspberry Pi 4 3GB listed on the product page and on resellers such as Robu (India) and RaspberryPi.dk. It’s also not the first SBC with 3GB of RAM around, since Orange Pi 4 LTS was introduced with 3GB LPDDR4 (2x 1.5GB) or 4GB LPDDR4 (2x 2GB) in 2022.
In addition to the new 3GB RAM SBC, Raspberry Pi announced the third round of price increases for Raspberry Pi 4/5 SBCs, Raspberry Pi 500/500+ keyboard PCs, Compute Modules 4/5, and AI HAT+ 2 as summarized in the table below.
Raspberry Pi only provided the price increases, so I added the actual prices to show the extent of the damage, and that’s before any taxes and shipping. The entry-level Raspberry Pi 4/5 1GB models are still priced at $35 and $45, and the 2GB variants go for $55/$65. Other SBCs from Orange Pi, Radxa, Banana Pi, Hardkernel, and other manufacturers are also impacted, but the impact may differ depending on the type and brand of RAM chips, and it may pay off to shop around. I can also see some resellers haven’t updated their prices, so you can still order Raspberry Pi hardware at the old price for the next few days or hours?.
Going forward, I have absolutely no idea what will happen to the price of RAM. On one end, I’ve just read OpenAI may not buy as much memory as initially anticipated, and on the other end, the war in the Middle East may entail short-term and long-term supply disruptions that are hard to predict. Notably, Helium supply constraints may impact semiconductor manufacturing capacity, while blowing up datacenters in the Middle East may create more demand for RAM chips and GPUs, as they are relocated to calmer shores.
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Are there really 1.5GB LPDDR4 chips? Isn’t it more likely that it has one 2GB chip and another 1GB chip?
See Orange Pi 4 LTS:
> Are there really 1.5GB LPDDR4 chips?
By choosing the more suited search term ’12Gb LPDDR4′ you’ll notice that Samsung introduced this category over a decade ago.
I was still clinging to the good old “RAM sizes come in powers of 2”, but apparently someone thought it a good idea to change that. If somebody wants it they will make it…
There are single 3 GB chips too. They’ve been around for quite a few years now and that’s how we got 24 and 48 GB RAM modules among other things, even if that’s DDR5 and not LPDDR4, but the two are quite similar technology wise.
As this story reminds, Raspberry Pi 4 got a dual RAM PCB variant in February to make it easier to source RAM chips.
You even commented on that article!
Yeah, I edited the post, as I had forgotten about that.
Why? You can buy Rubik Pi3 with 8GB for $99 right now.
Rock 5C with 8GB is about the same also, with better software.
Because not everyone has long-term contracts and then get screwed by the market.
Ah yes who could forgot the rubik pi3 whose GitHub is loaded with metric tons of binary blobs. Totally normal.
Remember when the tech space was scoffing at Raspberry Pi 5 16 GB for $120? Those were the days… we didn’t realize that it was an investment!
No more party balloons either.
About the actual product, and disregarding the pricing and competition, would anyone be interested in picking 3 GB over 2/4? 2 GB is already a good minimum for some use cases like LibreELEC. 3 GB could be a new “desktop lite”, I guess.
If this isn’t an April fools joke, that pi 500+ price is insane! It’s just not worth anything like that!
This is basically what $15-20/GB memory looks like.
We’re heading towards RAM-on-demand… “How much RAM can I get for the $75 I have in my pocket ? 2.73GB ? Please make an effort, raise that to 2.75GB, let me kill a process, and that could work”.
*SCOFFS*
Memory isn’t that damned expensive. Let’s be real. Raspberry Pi is taking advantage of the situation. When I can pick up a Radxa Dragon Q6A 12GB for $99 which runs circles around the Pi 5 it’s blatant that they are f*cking their customers.
Or it’s blatant that you don’t understand how the industry works.
All the xinese companies will follow with price increases as soon as their current stock runs out and they will not be incremental, there will be massive jumps.