16GB on a pi doesn’t even make sense. It’s super inefficient. That ramm would be much better off in a datacenter \s
Think of poor Sam Altman before you buy a 16GB Pi!
Counterpoint:
Why are you so negative towards somebody who is not at all an ultra-greedy lying slimy sleazy sociopath and super-entitled cunt???
he stole my bike drawing
$385 for a 16 GB Pi seems crazy.
Cheapest 16GB DDR5 stick I could go buy from the local computer parts store here in Finland is currently 363€, or $406.
The rpi does not have ddr5, the price makes no sense
Well, that’s great, if the price is entirely made up by the Raspi foundation and not actually caused by the massively increased memory fab costs, it means the competition is going to release a much cheaper version any day now and steal the entire market from them.
Yes as soon as the invisible hand finishes jerking off billionaires, it will get to reducing prices for us
Well… per the linked comment’s thread… they did… by replacing the ddr chips on raspi, and raspi just did the usual walled garden corpo dystopian lockdown. For a full product with a well known name like raspi I guess it will be some years…
I thought you were joking but even in Turkey the cheapest one is 300 dollars. I bought 2x16 for less than 100 couple years ago. Holy shit.
Arduino has a 16GB DDR5 board designed to run local LLMs for $299. And it has 64GB of storage on board. Granted it’s not as flexible as a Pi, but it has DDR5 RAM, and a good bit of storage on board for cheaper.
A 16GB Raspberry pi with DDR4 for $385 is just robbery.
I think 299 was just preorder 399 is current.
BananaPI board I used to use for some projects has gone from about 120-150 to almost 400. It’s not just raspberry with this issue.
This is reminding me of hikes in property prices. Soon, older people are gonna say shit like
- I paid that much for 32 megabytes 25 years ago
- Why do you need so much RAM? Just use fewer programs
- If you didn’t spend so much money on Steam and Netflix you’d be able to afford it
I started with computers in the cassette tape/5,25 floppy diskette era. RAM was measured in K’s, not Megas, not Gigas. A flight simulator (white pixels on green background, yeah) fit in a diskette, 360 KB.
Code was ultra efficient, as RAM was tiny.
With time, and as RAM got proportionally cheaper, code got sloppy, because, hey, we got space.
It’s true that programs today are several orders of magnitude more capable, but it is also true that code now is hideously RAM inefficient and bloated.
I’m not saying that the RAMcopalypse isn’t real, I run a Ryzen 9 with 64Gb in my desktop, bought before the bubble, but as the Microsoft backpedal to 8 Gigs for W11, and the 8 Gig Macbook show, software should be rethought.
AND RAM prices should go back to normal. That’s the win-win
Going back to the 8-bit era muddies the water. Those computers and programs really were so limited. However, comparing what we were doing 20 years ago on 2 or 4GB of ram vs now and you see the sloppness of the software.
You are expressing an illusion. The reason programs and operating systems use more ram is that they are doing more. If somebody stopped caring about resources it is web devs and Microsoft. Real-time and high end apps, like all games, have optimized frame time and the floppy era games is what looks sloppy in comparison. Except for sawyers insane games. Those are still somehow the cutting edge and a marvel of engineering to learn from 30 years later.
It’s true that programs today are several orders of magnitude more capable, but it is also true that code now is hideously RAM inefficient and bloated.
The entire codebase of software in production, yes. But one thing that people might not realize is that some of our software algorithms themselves, at least for certain algorithm families, are also much more efficient than before.
I thought this was an interesting overview:
https://futuretech.mit.edu/publication/how-fast-do-algorithms-improve
The focus isn’t on memory usage, but the same general trend applies there: when someone discovered a new algorithm that improves on old ones, it can change the amount of memory used to accomplish a specific result.
Having written both hand-coded assembler for microcontrollers and vibe-coded WebUI … things, I don’t know where my allegiance lies anymore.
Just cut down on the avacado toast.
They currently are. Just take a look into gaming forums discussing graphic carts and RAM prices and there will be so many people writing that they are happy that they have bought their stuff a few years ago. Which really is not helping
Folks these days don’t know how to cut down on their startup programs
Also I’m gonna sell my 32GB DDR5 for 5 times the price I bought it and then tell everyone “just work for a few years and buy RAM I did it myself back in the day”
Why do you need so much RAM? Just use fewer programs
Even a broken clock…
Ummm can’t you just buy a full size all-in-one motherboard for that? I mean, if you need small size sure, but I originally bought Pi’s because they were cheap and small. Now they’re just small.
Yep, and unless you really need the pi form factor just get a small n100 mini PC at this point. They are pretty much better in every way and are x86 so there’s practically no limit to what you can run on them. I’ve seen n100 16gb mini PCs for as low as $60 on auction sites because some business will buy tons of them then sell them off for cheap when they upgrade.
Want something faster? Look into business small PCs they are about the size of the small ps2 and will have Intel i3s to i7s. I’d just recommend looking for one that is at least the 8th gen Intel if you care about power efficiency. If using eBay search for used auctions and use a bid sniper that uses the official api
Want something faster? Look into business small PCs they are about the size of the small ps2 and will have Intel i3s to i7s. I’d just recommend looking for one that is at least the 8th gen Intel if you care about power efficiency. If using eBay search for used auctions and use a bid sniper that uses the official api
Are they still available? When I looked recently, most of it was Haswell/4th gen, and/or the seller had taken nearly all the parts out, like the memory, drives, and CPU.
Yes there will still be big sell offs I recently got a 16GB n100 from someone selling a batch of around 100. You can set up eBay notifications for saved searches it is getting more competitive getting one for $60 is the absolute best case expect closer to $80+shipping.
You can also check alibaba if you can spend bit more and have some older ddr4 laying around. They have n100 mini PCs with expendable storage and ram and multiple Ethernet ports. you can normally find them if you get the versions that don’t come with any ddr4
Edit: make sure it’s listed as compatible with ddr4 not ddr5 there are a lot of ddr5 versions now
N100 maybe not. N150 is what it going around lately. Price would be similar to rpi5 but is much more capable x86 machine.
better in every way
are x86
Pick one.
How is arm better than x86
Yeah, and a modern x86 setup will be faster and likely even more efficient under load, with better software support too.
16GB pie is like buying disposable silk toilet paper.
This RPi has more ram than my gaming pc lol
The price increase itself is more than I paid for a new Pi4B a few years back. Amazing.
I found a $10 Pi4B at one of those overstock outlets. Keep an eye you there, it’s mostly junk but you can find that deals.
The 16GB was Usless, now it even more useless cause of the software it can run and its raw performance, Even the 8GB one went from reasonable for the performance to too expensive.
I feel like RPI lost the plot at some point. Like the entire point of them was a small minimal headless system that runs low end programs and scripts like a dns server or home automation system. I don’t really see why something like that needs 16 gb of ram(or a nearly 400$ price point). At the new pricing, why would anyone want to go for a Pi vs just getting a low end pc which contains actual hardware meant for higher end systems.
I guess form factor? I feel like you are just artificially restricting yourself going with the higher end pi’s vs just biting the bullet and going with a normal system.
Also I feel I should mention that this was also the same company that decided to link the ram to the firmware meaning you no longer can buy a pi and then solder a new ram on it. They claimed it was to prevent counterfeit sellers putting bad ram in it but, it still puts a bad taste in my mouth. The only way to bypass it is to go back to the 2024-9-23 firmware.
Raspberry pi started as a weird educational side project of a Broadcom engineer, and that enabled them to work with a dirt cheap mass produced SoC for the first iterations. Without broadcom, there would be no raspberry pi. The problem is, it got wildly successful, and moved from side project to actual project that makes money, and education for poor kids wasn’t as much of a priority anymore.
The entire point of them was to be a cheap, open, educational computer for kids. Even the hobbyist/homelab use-case lost the plot, let alone the commercial bullshit they’re targeting these days!
honestly I would argue that is the same plot(or at least overlapping). Low end systems would be an entry level use case for sysadmin and network design. that’s how I got started, I had an RPI that I used as a DNS, file backup and a chat bot I ran, learned a lot from the experience. But I can see how it could be taken into the commercial field as well.
I’ll admit that being a cheap way for adults to learn is plot-adjacent. But at its core, Raspberry Pi was intended to be the spiritual successor of stuff like the BBC Micro, Alan Kay’s KiddieComp/Dynabook, and OLPC.
(The shared purpose and British heritage of the BBC Micro is part of why the Raspberry Pi people picked ARM instead of x86, by the way.)
Honest question, what are people using their 16GB RPis for? What are you running that needs that much RAM?
I got a rock-5-itx in the before times with a decadent 32GB of RAM. It’s my home server, and it’s currently using 19/31GB:
The headroom is nice, I guess. Sometimes I spin up whole desktop dev environments I can access remotely.
For Halloween I used an orangepi (cause of cost, but would not recommend due to support) to install an LCD eye in a skeleton that tracks people using a object detection model. Additionally it’s setup with some voice commands/interactions.
Overall that means holding 3+ ML models in ram (yolo, whisper, Vad, etc.). That basically uses up all the RAM I have and before optimizations was actually causing the chip to overheat (was able to fix that, but still hits the cpu pretty hard).
Two things I’ve found that really help having more ram for on the pi’s:
- Any kind of docker image.
- Build times if you use the pi as an agent/runner for gitlab-ce.
I guess that makes sense. Personally I don’t see SBCs as very good Docker hosts or build machines. Aren’t build times and such affected much more by the weak CPU? Obviously if the system starts swapping, then sure, having more RAM to avoid that helps a lot.
The following has been my own experience:
On a pi, you’re much more likely to run out of memory than cpu compute. The increased memory gives you more concurrent things to run…images etc.
Back when I got them and they were just north of a 100 bucks it made a lot of sense. Not so much with current prices.
Having them tho, I really enjoy using them with poe. Their idle power draw is very low. Which is great for budget homelabs. But if I was looking for hardware today I’d look for used nucs.
Been on a NUC for years and if this thing finally shits the bed I’ll be on eBay hunting another one. Neat thing with NUCs is you can pick your price point and get a unit from $<100-$3,000.
I installed SteamLink on it and use it to stream my gaming PC to my living room, which is too far away for an HDMI cord. I can get 1440p @ 120fps with no issues.
Surely simple streaming doesn’t require much RAM at all. That was my point, for most people’s use cases, the 4GB or 8GB variants should be more than enough.
If it were just videos, then sure. But games require a little more. Maybe 16gb is a bit more than what’s needed, but it’s the unit I have.
I suppose it would be good for a large number of mostly idle services. Nextcloud, home assistant, a few other containers. Things that don’t do much except for brief periods, but still need to be running. Add in a zfs or btrfs filesystem and some of those operations will use a lot of ram.
I certainty wouldn’t go that route, I’ve found that 2-4GB in an SBC more than meets the purposes I use them for. I also don’t think I’m willing to run off a microsd anymore now that I’ve discovered emmc and ufs boards.
I got one for 180 recently, if this keeps going I’ll have to sell it and retire
I‘m glad my old Pi3 is holding on just fine running Pi-hole and some intranet stuff in my apartment.
It’s the end of the personal computer era. Who’d have thought it was going to be so soon. Or at all.
Be of good cheer. The AI bubble will pop and drag the economy down so hard you’ll be more worried about food than your PC.
The price of a 3gb pi4 is insane.
