When the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC launched last year, it came in 4 and 8 GB RAM variants, which currently retail for around $80-€90 for the 8 GB variant and $60-€65 for the 4 GB variant. Now Raspberry Pi has announced the launch of a third Raspberry Pi 5 variant: a 2 GB version that also features a new stepping of the BCM2712 SoC. This is expected to cost around $50 and features D0 stepping, which supposedly removes much of the “dark silicon” not used on the SBC.

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

Whether 2GB is enough for your purposes depends on your use case, but for some it might be worth knocking $10 off the price of an RPi 5. Perhaps even more interestingly, this same D0 stepping of the SoC is likely to be used on the other RAM variants as well. We’re waiting for benchmarks to see what the practical difference is between the current C1 and the new D0 stepping.

Thanks to (Mark Stevens) for the tip.