Desperate times call for desperate measures. Raspberry Pi has decided to introduce a dual RAM variant of the Raspberry Pi 4 to allow DRAM supply chain flexibility along with manufacturing process improvement using intrusive reflow soldering.
As you may remember, Raspberry Pi first increased the price of most Raspberry Pi 4/5 boards last December while launching the Raspberry Pi 5 1GB RAM to offer a $45 option. At the end of last month, we noted broad market price adjustments due to not only RAM prices, but also storage devices, SoCs, and other components. A few days ago, Raspberry Pi had to further increase the price of the Raspberry Pi 4/5 for the 2GB to 16GB RAM models as follows:
- 1GB – unchanged
- 2GB – +$10
- 4GB – +$15
- 8GB – +$30
- 16GB – +$60
It’s not out of the realm of possibility that we may end up in a situation where two 4GB RAM chips are cheaper than one 8GB RAM chip. To mitigate further price increases or availability issues, the Raspberry Pi 4 v1.5 “Dual RAM” variant is born.
If the silkscreen on the top of the board reads “Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (C) Raspberry Pi 2025” then you have a board with the new version of the PCB (Rev 13a). You’ll also find a second LPDDR4 device on the underside of the board, plus a few passive components that are not present in previous revisions of the Raspberry Pi 4.
Software-side, it does not change anything, but you can detect the new board with cat /proc/cpuinfo showing the “Model” as “Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.5”. One potentially important detail is that the board is only supported by bootloader versions from 9 Jan 2026 onwards (pieeprom-2026-01-09.bin).
A list of possible RAM chips is listed in PCN 46, but it doesn’t show up in the list of Product Change Notices for the Raspberry Pi 4, at this time, either because it hasn’t been uploaded or it requires a special account. You can access PCN 45 in that link for the full details about the new Raspberry Pi 4 Dual RAM version.
Via Hackster.io
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress. We also use affiliate links in articles to earn commissions if you make a purchase after clicking on those links.
So LPDDR4.
Is LPDDR3 4GB cheaper and still available?
Let’s hope they didn’t have to lower the DRAM frequency for putting two chips on the bus, since DRAM bandwidth already isn’t an area where RPis shine.
They have just updated PCN 30 with new RAM Chip info
PCN 30 is only for the 1GB RAM version. It was updated on October 6, 2025.
Weird, I see on the site currently
PCN 30: Pi 4 Alternative sources of RAM
Updated 5 Feb 2026
Though yes, it does only mention “new” Rayson ram and not a list of all ram
Ah OK. It has been updated since the screenshot in the article. Oddly, the document says PCN 46, but the list ends up in PCN 30.
Interesting to benchmark against a regular 8GB.
Is a dual channel possible?
Maybe it will have some small performance increases from being a very new board revision.
It’s not a x86/x64 PC, there’s no dual channel in that sense in the world of Arm SoCs.
The RPi 4 has a 32-bit wide bus and moving to two chips means that two 16-bit memory chips would be used, for a 32-bit wide memory bus.
In a German news portal it is written that the main reason for the change is that the new Chinese ram supplier doesn’t offer 8GB chips. Interesting take at the things
Does RPi use Chinese suppliers for DRAM?
The image in this article shows a Micron chip.
List of alternative RAM chips from PCN 30.
Rayson RS256M32LZ4D2BNP-62BT 1GB
Rayson RS256M32LN4D2ANR-53BT 1GB
Rayson RS512M32LO4D1BDS-53BT 2GB
Rayson RS512M32LM4D2BDS-53BT-D 2GB
Rayson RS1G32LV4D2BDS-46BT 4GB
Alternative chips are from “RAYSON HI-TECH (SZ) LIMITED”.
Exactly, it seems the second footprint is in preparation for the new supplier not offering large enough chips, maybe also to unify the bom between different ram options
New “for alternative sources of RAM” PCNs released for Raspberry Pi 5 and CM5 with the following parts (Micron still default):
Pi 5:
Rayson RS1G32LV4D2BDS-46BT – 4GB
Winbond W66DP2RQQAHJ – 1GB
Pi CM5:
Rayson RS1G32LV4D2BDS-46BT – 4GB
[ how about innovative RAM utilization (maybe not that efficient like onboard, but cheaper? for the capacity of (large) RAM arrays (SBCs with nowadays 16-32GB?) that are only partly utilized? Concepts therefore (with increasing RAM/memory prices and (timely) lower availability)? (thx) ]
Or just offering an 1 or 2 gb version but with a sodimm slot 😀
Or teaching users to take Python, NodeJS and browsers out of the equation for their automation needs, and we’re back to the situation where 16-32 MB are way sufficient to run anything (after all we used to run Windows NT with MS-office, browsers and IDEs on less than that 30 years ago and it used to be smooth, what happened since?). For example my home MQTT server still runs on an old wrt54gl with 16MB RAM and it feels completely at ease since it only takes 2MB (there’s also an HTTP server and dnsmasq on the machine BTW).
[ headless tasks, yes, but with desktops and (only, e.g.) a modern browser, combined with office tasks, maybe 4GB of memory is already (sometimes) getting too small (esp. with AI tasks, what’s the current origin of memory supply demand)
(while python environment is much less than compiling rust projects (even just a hello.world example with one to several hundred MB of storage) and me did not feel that python (used to be)/is very high on memory consumption, depending on tasks?)
Congratulations for efficient automation from my side, but You’re a ‘burden/disturbance’ to ‘sales marketing’ for financial growth and browser dependent WYSIWYG configurations and monitoring/data visualization 🙂 (thx) ]
There are many use cases for the pi, not all seem to be happy with 1G max. So those who need it can have more, does it harm those who don’t need it, as long as the lower end options persist?
[ offering external USB?-RAM/memory expansion? (hot-plugging, inserting durability 2k-10k vs. 25-50(?)) combined with storage, but separately accessible?, since PCIe is not/rarely available at version 3.0/4.0 (RPi 2.x/maybe 3.0 (~5-8GT/s, ~0.5-0.95GB/s (per lane), 1lane) for the mass of SBCs? or network related with 1Gbit ~100MB/s, 2.5Gbit ~250MB/s, 10Gbit ~1GB/s(?) (thx) ]
Sorry didn’t get you there?
Sodimm is a standard and can be salvaged from old laptops etc.where is hot plugging of ram applied?
[ hot-plugging might be a new feature, if this is with new sockets like CAMM(2) or USB connected memory (latency, interrupts?, bw ~USB4/TB) and memory from old laptops has to be DDR4 (not so old)? What might be the amount of old unused memory from older computers ((LP)DDR3/4)? (thx) ]
[ or CAMM(2) (‘https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/09/29/samsung-lpcamm-integrates-lpddr-ram-on-removable-modules/’), HBM(4), SOM (standardized, like AMD cpu sockets, long-term avail.), external with gpu-based memory sharing (GDDR(7), SBCs and connectors, USB4/Thunderbolt?), swap on eMMCs (~300MB/s)(?) other innovations there? (thx) ]