Cheapest 16GB DDR5 stick I could go buy from the local computer parts store here in Finland is currently 363€, or $406.

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.

last time i bought one was pre-pandemic, not sure exactly how much i paid, but was under $50 new, to hear they are $400 now... i guess i go back under my rock

I bought several of them when they were 120. But yea at current rate, not really worth it. I will say it's nice running them off of PoE. Keeps my energy bill lower.

Hrm, I could get 2 Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB RAM, or I could get one PS5.

Think of poor Sam Altman before you buy a 16GB Pi!

When it was introduced the Pi cost $15

It was a 700MHz single core board with 512mb of ram...and it was $35, not $15

Also when Raspberry Pi started, it was a not-for-profit. In a way, they went through the same transformation as OpenAI (which started not-for-profit too) but slightly earlier.

They're going to run into speed bumps soon enough. Capital problems are starting to appear in the AI market over the past month, that's going to get a LOT worse. And no matter what, production in 5 years won't look like it does today. Between competition, newer production tech, and political upheaval, it's going to be a hell of a ride.

Yes but a pi zero 2w is $15 and is roughly equivalent to an OG B+. The problem as I see it is that computing segments like pis are jumping into the next segment up in power and in cost and nobody’s doing a very good job of marketing that or marketing the new product in the lower tier that are meant to actually replace them.

I remember reading scifi stories from the 60's and prior where they imagine giant UNIVAC-style computers that people connect to with dumb terminals, renting cpu time. And even in the ones focused on how awesome that future would be it sounced miserable to me.

And then there's nVidia, making DLSS5 that requires serious computing power while causing ram shortage.

I thought 64GB was overkill when I got it in my Framework laptop in 2024, but now I'm so glad that I did.

Sam Altman has been explicit about

Sam lies as easily as he breathes. Nothing he says is proof of anything.

Not everything is a conspiracy launched by shady billionaires in smoky back rooms. This is straightforward.

The AI companies are in competition so they're building AI DCs at a breakneck pace in hopes of being the one who crawls out the blast crater when the bubble pops. This building mania predictably sent shock waves through RAM and other tech supply chains.

As to home compute, most people happily ditched their PCs a decade ago and do everything on their phone. I'm not sure tablets are popular anymore. Keep in mind, most consumers can't pronounce Raspberry Pi and sure don't want or need one. Ask the "man on the street" what he thinks of the RAM shortage and you'll get a blank stare.

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

Yeah, and a modern x86 setup will be faster and likely even more efficient under load, with better software support too.

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

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"

Just cut down on the avacado toast.

Why do you need so much RAM? Just use fewer programs

Even a broken clock...

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 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!

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.