Today, our flagship Raspberry Pi 5 family gains a new member. Priced at just $50, the new 2GB variant continues our mission to bring high-performance general-purpose computing to the widest possible audience.

It’s been a little over ten months since we launched Raspberry Pi 5. In many ways, this is the product that finally delivered on the original Raspberry Pi dream: an affordable general-purpose desktop computer, indistinguishable from a traditional PC for most users, and bundled with all the tools and collateral required for a beginner to go from “hello, world” to a career in engineering.

Raspberry Pi 5 is on the order of 150 times as powerful as the original Raspberry Pi that we launched back in 2012. Much of that performance increase comes from clever engineering, from the economies of scale that result from building millions of computers a year, and from the continued operation of Moore’s Law. But as we’ve continued to reach for performance, some components of the design have inevitably become more expensive. Until now, the lowest-cost Raspberry Pi 5 was the 4GB variant, priced at $60.

Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of the 2GB Raspberry Pi 5, built on a cost-optimised D0 stepping of the BCM2712 application processor, and priced at just $50.

New board, new chip

The 4GB and 8GB variants of Raspberry Pi 5 are built around two key chips: the RP1 I/O controller, developed here at Raspberry Pi and providing the interfacing capabilities of the platform; and BCM2712C1, a 16nm application processor built by our friends at Broadcom.

BCM2712C1 is a hugely complex and powerful device, with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 application processor running at 2.4GHz, and the latest iteration of the VideoCore multimedia platform. Alongside the features required to power a Raspberry Pi, it also contains functionality intended to serve other markets, which we don’t need. This ‘dark silicon’ is permanently disabled in the chips we use, but takes up die space, and therefore adds cost.

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.

Saving memory, saving money

One of the many advantages of building our own operating system, Raspberry Pi OS, is that we get to focus on optimising resource usage. Historically, this allowed us to deliver a better user experience on devices with far less memory and processing power than today’s flagship product. Retaining the ability to run the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS on those older products remains an important goal of our software work.

When running on modern hardware, the practical result has been a modern operating system with a dramatically lighter resource footprint than most general-purpose Linux distributions. So, while our most demanding users — who want to drive dual 4Kp60 displays, or open a hundred browser tabs, or compile complex software from source — will probably stick with the existing higher memory-capacity variants of Raspberry Pi 5, many of you will find that this new, lower-cost variant works perfectly well for your use cases.

You asked for a lower cost Raspberry Pi 5, so here it is: now show us what you can do with it!