Cost-optimized Raspberry Pi 5 with 2GB RAM and D0 Stepping Released

When the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC was released last year, it came in 4GB and 8GB RAM variants, which currently sell for between $80 and €90 for the 8GB variant and $60 and €65 for the 4GB variant. Raspberry Pi has now announced a third variant of the Raspberry Pi 5: a 2GB version that also features a new version of the BCM2712 SoC. This one will reportedly sell for around $50 and will feature the D0 version, which will eliminate much of the “dark silicon” that isn’t used on the SBC.

These unused die features are likely due to the fact that the Broadcom SoCs used on Raspberry Pi SBCs are actually recycled set-top box SoCs and the like. This means that some features that make sense in a set-top box or the like don’t make sense for a general purpose SBC, but still take up die space and increase the defect rate. So D0 scaling seems to be based on an optimized die, with the only possible downside being higher power density due to a (presumably) smaller die, making active cooling even more important.

Whether 2GB is enough for your needs depends on your use case, but a $10 discount on the price of an RPi 5 might be worth it for some. Perhaps more interestingly, this same D0 SoC evolution is likely to make its way to the other RAM variants as well. We’ll wait for benchmarks to see what the practical difference is between the current C1 evolutions and the new D0 evolutions.

Thanks to (Mark Stevens) for the information.