Raspberry Pi 5 gets a 16GB upgrade for memory-intensive applications

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has expanded its Raspberry Pi 5 lineup with the launch of a 16GB variant, priced at $120. This new model joins the previously released 4GB and 8GB versions introduced in 2023 and the cheaper 2GB model released last summer.

In a blog post announcing the new model, the company explains that it continues to be impressed by the diverse projects its hardware is being used in.

"Many of these fit into 8GB (or even 2GB) of SDRAM, but the threefold step up in performance between Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 opens up use cases like large language models and computational fluid dynamics, which benefit from having more storage per core. And 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."

SEE ALSO: Raspberry Pi AI Kit brings artificial intelligence to the Raspberry Pi 5

The post explains that the upgraded D0 stepping of the Broadcom BCM2712 application processor now supports memory configurations larger than 8GB, and Micron's development of a single package containing eight 16Gbit LPDDR4X memory chips made the 16GB Pi5 variant possible for the first time.

The 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 is available to buy now.