- New Raspberry Pi 5 product that doubles the maximum amount of RAM will cost $120 or your regional equivalent
- The expansion aims to accommodate increasingly demanding AI workloads.
- The alternative should also benefit installations of third-party Linux distributions
The 16GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board microcomputer is now generally available, along with Raspberry Pi carbon removal credits, allowing you to offset the carbon footprint associated with the production and disposal of a product. Pi.
Raspberry Pi Foundation CEO Eben Upton announced the product and initiative in a blog post, while the company laid out its carbon removal plan (with purchase options) on a handy landing page.
Upton said the 16GB model was created to accommodate new use cases made possible by a “three-fold” increase in performance from the Pi 4 to 5, such as large AI language models “and computational fluid dynamics, which benefit from having more storage per core. “
Raspberry Pi 16GB Possibilities
Upton went on to say that although the Raspberry Pi operating system already has low base memory requirements, “heavy” Linux distributions like Ubuntu will benefit from the additional memory. Although 2GB to 8GB of RAM may be sufficient for Pi-powered hobby projects, 16GB is typically the minimum needed for a comfortable desktop experience these days.
Also, Ubuntu is a great Linux distribution for beginners, so I'm glad it's mentioned. The Pi 5 16GB variant sounds like a great low-cost option for anyone looking to get into running a Linux desktop environment for the first time.
While the Pi 5's Broadcom BCM2712 application processor already supported RAM capacities greater than 8GB, Upton says Micron “offers[ing] [the company] a single package containing eight of their 16Gbit LPDDR4X arrays” is what made a 16GB Pi 5 model possible.
Raspberry Pi Carbon Removal Credits Program
What's even better than the reveal of an already pretty good product is the announcement of a carbon removal credit program for Pi products.
In the post, Upton acknowledged that despite their small size and low weight, the manufacturing, logistics and disposal of Pi units carry a “small initial carbon footprint.” So now, for just $4 USD or your regional equivalent, you can, through an approved reseller, purchase a credit that will mitigate that footprint.
Explaining how this works, Upton said that “we commission [decarbonization company] Inhabit will conduct an independent assessment of the carbon footprint of manufacturing, shipping and disposal of a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, which amounted to 6.5kg CO₂ equivalent. When you purchase a Raspberry Pi carbon removal credit from one of our approved resellers, we pay our friends at UNDO Carbon to start capturing that amount of CO2 from the atmosphere using enhanced rock weathering (ERW) technology.
He also went into precise detail about the ERW process, which here involves spreading crushed basalt on agricultural land to safely store carbon within rocks that form over a matter of decades, thereby removing it from the atmosphere.
