- New Raspberry Pi 5 product doubling the max amount of RAM will cost $120 or your regional equivalent
- Expansion is aimed at accommodating increasingly taxing AI workloads
- Alternative should also benefit third-party Linux distribution installs
The 16GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board microcomputer is now generally available, along with Raspberry Pi Carbon Removal Credits, making it possible to offset the carbon footprint involved with producing and disposing of a Pi product.
Raspberry Pi Foundation CEO Eben Upton announced the product and initiative in a blog post, while the company set 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 “threefold” performance increase from the Pi 4 to the 5, such as AI large language models “and computational fluid dynamics, which benefit from having more storage per core.”
Raspberry Pi 16GB’s possibilities
Upton went on to say that, though Raspberry Pi OS already has low base memory requirements, “heavyweight” Linux distributions like Ubuntu will benefit from the additional memory. Though 2GB through to 8GB of RAM may be enough for hobbyist projects powered by a Pi, 16GB is typically the minimum required for a comfortable desktop experience in this day and age.
Plus, Ubuntu is a great Linux distribution for beginners, so I’m glad to hear it get a mention. The 16GB Pi 5 variant sounds like a great low-cost option for anyone looking to dabble in running a Linux desktop environment for the first time.
While the Pi 5’s Broadcom BCM2712 application processor already supported RAM capacities beyond 8GB, Upton claims that Micron “offer[ing] [the company] a single package containing eight of their 16Gbit LPDDR4X die” is what made a 16GB Pi 5 model possible.
Raspberry Pi’s Carbon Removal Credits program
What’s even better than an already quite good product reveal is the announcement of a carbon removal credits program for Pi products.
In the post, Upton acknowledged despite its small size and low weight, the manufacturing, logistics and disposal of Pi units does come with a “small, upfront carbon footprint”. So, now, for just $4 USD or your regional equivalent, you can, through an approved reseller, buy a credit that will mitigate that footprint.
Explaining how this works, Upton said that “we commissioned [decarbonization company] Inhabit to conduct an independent assessment of the carbon footprint of manufacturing, shipping, and disposing of a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, which came to 6.5kg of CO₂ equivalent. When you buy a Raspberry Pi Carbon Removal Credit from one of our Approved Resellers, we pay our friends at UNDO Carbon to begin capturing that quantity 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 inside rocks that form over a matter of decades, thus removing it from the atmosphere.
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