Raspberry Pi 5 arrived in 2023, almost three years ago, and brought some interesting changes. The founders recently hinted at the release date of the upcoming version in a Reddit interaction. The company doesn’t have plans to release the Raspberry Pi 6 until early 2028. It continues the tradition of a longer wait cycle and is the first good thing to hear about since the unpredictable price surge of Raspberry Pi boards.
However, such a long delay is actually a good thing for hardcore Raspberry Pi enthusiasts. It ensures that the board arrives with pre-planned, refined changes and not a rushed launch.
Raspberry Pi 5 isn’t very old
It still has time to mature
Raspberry Pi 5 introduced NVMe support, which wasn’t a part of earlier versions. Adding a PCIe SSD into the mix meant your tiny SBC was finally able to experience what modern storage feels like. Your apps could run faster, and you wouldn’t need to worry about catastrophic failures that happen with SD cards. In addition, it offered direct NVMe storage access, which delivered native PCIe Gen 2.0 (3.0 with config tweaks) read and write speeds unlike NVMe USB adapters.
However, the board didn’t have the NVMe slot by default and needed additional HAT modules to snap the NVMe drive and then connect it to the Pi. During launch, there were very few options available, but that situation is changing now, and that’s good news for existing and future Pi 5 users. Stable software support and readily available accessories help build more complex projects and serve use cases that weren’t possible before.
The Pi 5 has adequate computing power to run most of the demanding self-hosted tools. But the software experience was wonky at launch. Slowly, the OS images and apps have adapted themselves to the board, and now can draw out maximum performance from it.
Cheap mini PCs are the death knell for Raspberry Pis
With x86 mini PCs becoming more budget-friendly, I find it hard to recommend Raspberry Pi SBCs
Surging memory prices are bad news
Pi 5 isn’t a budget device anymore
The current AI market trends have generated a huge demand for memory and storage components. Since the brands want a major chunk of these components to build more data centers, the manufacturing cost of single-board computers has jumped up a lot.
A Pi 5 2GB version launched for $50 but now retails at $65. Similarly, the most expensive Pi stood at $120 during the launch and now retails for over $200. That’s just the cost of the board itself. You still need a new NVMe storage drive, a HAT to connect the storage, a fan to keep things cool, and a power supply. All these things push the Pi 5 to the $250 price, and that’s what a modest mini PC retails for.
Rushing the launch for 2027 wouldn’t be an ideal move, as the market factors will push the Pi 6 price beyond satisfactory levels.
I buy Raspberry Pis because they are economical, and so do other enthusiasts. They might be the most expensive in the SBC segment, but they still offer a cheap entry into the embedded computing and mini-servers realm. Price is a major aspect of picking a Pi over other devices, and if it launches in 2027, there’s a minimal chance that it will have sensible pricing.
Even the current pricing rivals some great Mini PCs and old thin client models, and I doubt that Pi 6 could stop the tradition if it has an early launch. There’s no guarantee that the prices will drastically come down in 2028, but it could be less expensive than launching in 2027.
Pi 6 will focus on fundamentals
No AI enforcement
Raspberry Pi, at its core, has always been an enthusiast board to build incredible solutions with. You can create a simple use case device to run a few self-hosted tools, use it for automating other gadgets, or build ML and AI projects with it. Raspberry Pi 5 has an official AI HAT to add compute power for ML and AI tasks. So, there were expectations about it, including an NPU in the next version.
Radxa and a few other SBC brands already offer an NPU with some models. But Raspberry Pi 6 doesn’t plan to ship with an NPU. It strives to be an incremental upgrade with much better performance, largely due to an improved SoC and nothing else. Raspberry Pi’s CEO and co-creator, Eben Upton, clarified in the Reddit AMA that boosting CPUs will be the major contributing factor to AI development as algorithms mature. It means you can use additional AI HATs that can accelerate the board’s power rather than expecting an integrated one.
“As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m a big believer in the CPU as a venue for AI compute. Our users (enthusiasts and OEMs) are running workloads today on Raspberry Pi 5, which would have been squarely the province of GPUs a decade ago. So I think the best way to democratize AI is to give people fast, affordable CPUs.”
Since Pi 6 will be an incremental improvement, I expect it to focus on some glaring shortcomings of the boards. The focus is on overhauling the board rather than adding any stark changes. Surprisingly, the next Pi will also use a HAT like the Pi 5, and that is sad news. Faster I/O is great to have, but not including the SSD port forces an unnecessary HAT purchase just for using fast storage with the board.
Pi Zero 3W is a distant dream
Zero and Zero 2W will remain relevant
Raspberry Pi Zero 3W is also not possible in the near future, until the LPDDR4/4X memory prices come down. Design changes would become necessary for the Zero 3W because it would need a separate space for faster memory. I use multiple Zero 2W in my home. One of them powers a Vaultwarden instance while the other one acts as a remote downloading device for fresh distros and Windows Insider builds.
I would love to buy the next small yet powerful mini SBC, with faster and greater memory size than the 512 MB LPDDR2 module on the Pi Zero 2W. Raspberry Pi will continue to make Zero and Zero 2W because they have ample memory stock to build these models. But there’s little hope for the Zero 3W until DRAM prices return to normal.
Raspberry Pi 6 isn’t in a rush
Raspberry Pi makers aren’t in a hurry to ship the next iteration of the Pi just for the sake of it. Market factors are pushing them to plan strategically instead of just releasing a board that’s mildly innovative and unreasonably pricey. I want the Pi 6 to have a better price-to-performance ratio and don’t mind waiting a couple of years for it. Orange Pi and Radxa boards already offer much better hardware, and that might urge the Pi makers to refine the board even more.
- CPU
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Arm Cortex-A76 (quad-core, 2.4GHz)
- Memory
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Up to 8GB LPDDR4X SDRAM
The Raspberry Pi is back, and the fifth iteration of the SBC is a lot more capable than the older models. From a new quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, support for dual monitor setups at 4K 60Hz, and a dedicated power button, there’s a lot to love about this palm-sized computer.
