Raspberry Pi 5 now ships with 16GB RAM option

The Raspberry Pi 5 lineup now tops out at 16GB of RAM, joining the existing 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB variants. The board is built around a 2.4GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 CPU that delivers roughly 2-3x the performance of the Pi 4, paired with an 800MHz VideoCore VII GPU capable of driving dual 4Kp60 HDMI displays with HDR. Connectivity includes two USB 3.0 ports with simultaneous 5Gbps operation, dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, and Gigabit Ethernet with PoE+ support via a separate HAT.

The more significant story is the RP1 ‘southbridge,’ the first silicon designed in-house at Raspberry Pi to ship on a full-size board. It more than doubles aggregate USB bandwidth, triples MIPI bandwidth with a pair of four-lane 1.5Gbps transceivers supporting any mix of two cameras or displays, and doubles peak SD card throughput via SDR104 support. The board also exposes a single-lane PCIe 2.0 interface for the first time, opening the door to NVMe storage and other high-bandwidth peripherals through adapter HATs.

The 16GB option matters most for users pushing the Pi beyond hobbyist territory — local AI inference, containerized self-hosted services, and industrial workloads where the 8GB ceiling was a real constraint. Buyers should note the Pi 5 is a physical redesign, so Pi 4 cases won’t fit, and it wants a 27W (5V/5A) USB-C power supply to hit full performance.