The new 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 is the company's most powerful and expensive model yet.
We first announced Raspberry Pi 5 back in the autumn of 2023, with just two choices of memory density: 4GB and 8GB. Last summer, we released the 2GB variant, aimed at cost-sensitive applications. And today we're launching its bigger sibling, the 16GB variant, priced at $120. … We're continually surprised by the uses that people find for our hardware. 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.
It's interesting and a natural extension of the range's top end, but certainly a Pi enthusiast option. Most things I might want to do with it would be just as well done with a $150 mini PC, which comes with as much RAM but also storage, casing and a power supply.
