Looking back, 2024 feels like a golden year for single board computers, as the increasing price of RAM (and storage and other components) since late 2025 due to the AI demand has made those much less attractive, price/performance ratio-wise.
We’ve already documented Raspberry Pi SBC price hikes, and after several increases, the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB went from $120 to $305, or a 154% change in price. Yesterday, I noticed the Banana Pi BPI-M4 Zero had a new version with 4GB RAM and 32GB eMMC flash, and a reader was quick to point out the $181 price tag to Europe was painful, bearing in mind it also includes VAT and shipping. Looking at the original December 2023 article, the BPI-M4 Zero 2GB/8GB sold for $28.90 plus shipping, and it now shows up at $115 before taxes. That’s a 297% hike, or about four times the price from a little over two years ago.
So I thought it might be a good idea to check the price changes for several SBCs introduced in 2024, before all that craziness. I’ll use one Arm SBC from each major vendor, and also add a couple of x86 SBCs to see if they were impacted to the same extent.
Here are the candidates:
- Raspberry Pi 5 (reference) – Launched in September 2023 – Broadcom BCM2712 quad-core Cortex-A72 SBC with 4GB or 8GB LPDDR4X-4267, no default storage.
- Banana Pi BPI-M4 Zero – Launched in December 2023 – Raspberry Pi Zero-sized SBC with Allwinner H618 quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC, 2GB LPDDR4, 8GB eMMC flash.
- Orange Pi 5 Ultra – Launched in December 2024 – Rockchip RK3588 octa-core SBC with 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB LPDDR5, no default storage (except 16MB SPI flash)
- Radxa ROCK 5B+ – Launched in July 2024 – Rockchip RK3588 octa-core SBC with 4GB, 8GB, 16GB. 24GB, or 32GB LPDDR5, no default storage (except SPI flash)
- Hardkernel ODROID-M2 – Launched in August 2024 – Rockchip RK3588S2 octa-core SBC with 8GB or 16GB 64-bit LPDDR5, 64GB eMMC flash
- FriendlyELEC NanoPi Zero2 – Launched in September 2024 – Entry-level Rockchip RK3528 SBC with 1GB or 2GB LPDDR4/LPDDR4X, no storage by default
- NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit – Launched in December 2024 – Robotics/Edge AI SBC with a 6-core Arm Cortex-A78AE CPU, 8GB LPDDR5, no default storage. Note: subsidized hardware for developers.
- Radxa X4 – Launched in July 2024 – Entry-level x86 SBC with Intel N100 CPU, 4GB or 8GB LPDDR5, no storage by default (except SPI flash)
- UP Xtreme i14 – Launched in June 2024 – Higher end x86 SBC with Intel Core Ultra 5/7 Meteor Lake SoCs, up to 64GB LPDDR5, no storage by default
I’ll use the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB as a reference, so whenever possible, I’ll compare the pricing increase with 8GB variants of the boards. I used both ratio and percentage values for the price increases, depending on how you prefer to check price differences.
| Board | Memory | Storage | Launch Price | April 2026 Price | Ratio | Percentage | Remark |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 5 | 8GB LPDDR4 | N/A | $80 | $175 | 2.19x | +119% | MSRP |
| Banana Pi BPI-M4 Zero | 2GB LPDDR4 | 8GB eMMC flash | $28.90 | $115 | 3.97x | +297% | AliExpress |
| Orange Pi 5 Ultra | 16GB LPDDR5 | N/A | $125 | $309 | 2.47x | +148% | No stock/price for 8GB model |
| Radxa ROCK 5B+ | 8GB LPDDR5 | N/A | $90 | $129.99 (See remark) | 1.44x | +44.4% | Sold out |
| ODROID-M2 | 8GB LPDDR5 | 64GB eMMC flash | $115 | $195 | 1.69x | +69.5% | Kit with enclosure |
| NanoPi Zero2 | 1GB LPDDR4/LPDDR4X | N/A | $18 | $18 | 1.00x | 0% | |
| NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Devkit | 8GB LPDDR5 | N/A | $249 | $249 (See remark) | 1.00x | 0% | Sold out in most places |
| Radxa X4 | 8GB LPDDR5 | N/A | $79.96 | $265.99 | 3.33x | 233.5% | Launched on AliExpress, now on RS UK (ext VAT) |
| UP Xtreme i14 | 16GB LPDDR5 | N/A | $749 | $1,149 | 1.53x | 53.4% | Intel Core 5 125H model |
Some boards are out of stock, and vendors don’t rush to replenish stock for products they may not be able to sell at a profit. Talking about profit, several third-party sellers are trying to take advantage of the situation, and saw a Radxa Rock 5B+ with 8GB RAM on AliExpress for $450… Most of the prices don’t include shipping, and none integrate VAT or tariffs.
Only two products from the table didn’t see any price hike. The first is the NanoPi Zero2 1GB RAM, which is still sold for $18. The Raspberry Pi 4/5 with 1GB or 2GB RAM didn’t get price increases either, so it looks like lower capacity RAM chips are not impacted, or not too much. The second is the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit. I first thought it was because it was out of stock everywhere, but I eventually found it for the same $249 price tag on Amazon, which makes it a relatively good value.
The range of price changes from 0% to close to 300% is really amazing, so it pays off to shop around to find more affordable hardware matching your requirements. Tinkering with SBCs in 2026 is not a low-cost hobby, and it may feel like the (AI-generated) illustration below… until things improve (next year?).
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.
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The Raspberry Pi 5 16 GB was particularly funny. Launched at $120 to groans and shrugs from what I remember (and Jeff’s “When Did Raspberry Pi become the villain?” video was already a year old at that point). Now we are nostalgic for that kind of pricing.
If all you want is a cheap PC, you can still find used 6th/7th/8th gen systems with 16 GB RAM for under $100 on ebay in the US.
Jealous. They are over $200 in Japan, and I just bought a Dell with an i7-8700 for $300 after hunting for a while.
I wonder if Radxa, FrendlyElec and others will survive during this period.
Radxa is doing well, thanks for the care. And Radxa is going to have the ever first Developer Day together with Qualcomm in Shenzhen, China.
Some (relatively) budget friendly Qualcomm SBCs are coming.
Hi Tom, I’m glad to read that, thank you.
ohhh, with Xelite chips ?
Surely there will be X Elite, the world’s first Snapdragon
AIPC Motherboard.hey, that sounds really good, as mainline Linux support for X1e looks quiet descent.
If ever the X2e (even better) is in your plans, I’m okay to try this adventure with the vendor BSP kernel (6.6 ?) until it goes into mainline (as I did for the Rock5b, which is a lovely piece of hardware).
Once again thank you.
If you can convict Qualcomm to invest into a real Linux support vs a dying M$ WIN11 for aarch64, I’ll just applause.
All the best.
Windows on Arm may be another disaster so far, but I think it’s too big to fail and not going away anytime soon.
Supposedly, Nvidia N1X will be shown off at Computex (June), for a limited launch in October, and wider availability in Q1 2027. That will be another shot at Windows on Arm laptops (that’s already in DGX Spark desktops) with graphics that will likely work better than Qualcomm’s attempt.
I think the more successful one of these WoA products is, the more likely it is that people will bother to get Linux working on it.
Excited to see what you come up with! The Q6A is a nice little bit of kit, but it’s all about Qualcomm’s Linux support moving forward for me.
Happy to hear that! Times must not be funny for everyone, when arm’s prices are closer from or even higher than x86 due to mass production.
For new generation entry level x86 chips such as Wildcat Lake, pricing is still relatively high. It is just that rising DRAM costs now make the CPU a smaller share of the total device cost. In this context, a low cost CPU becomes less attractive. For example, on a 16 GB RAM device priced around $500, would most users pay an extra $50 for a CPU that delivers twice the performance? I think most would say yes.
Yes that’s exactly my point. While many of us do value Arm chips for plenty of reasons (lower peak power draw, cost, relatively good ecosystem etc), when you only have to pay 10% more to avoid waiting a year or two for decent kernel/bootloader support, I guess that most people would definitely do so. In the past, you could get a NanoPi for $9.90, you would add a micro-SD and you had a complete computer, so it made a lot of sense to save on CPU costs. Nowadays much less.
The initial RPi had 256MB of RAM IIRC, and that was plenty sufficient by then. Presumably we’ll see RAM sizes drop on SBC to make them remain affordable, and the horribly hungry and sluggish graphics environments will leave the place to efficient and well-coded ones, allowing affordable SBC to sell again. At least I think there should be a good interest for SBC vendors to invest effort on making the software ecosystems efficient again. The current distros that can’t install on a 8GB flash and require GBs of RAM might become outdated or reserved for expensive servers in the mid-term.
[ There are hw accelerators for ‘established’ LLMs (being hw circuits) for AI that require far less power (1/10-1/100) and memory(?) resources? And there might be increase in memory production (on bigger nodes?) for lower cost, but slightly increased power consumption on 12-16-32GB, socketed?, memory devices?
And it’s not only a (global) hw community, but also a sw community?
‘x86_64’ stayed stable for the expectations and demand on ‘ordinary’/default computing demand/profiles, but for special ARM/riscV tasks, there’s not (always) that need for big amount of memory, except AI or multi media(?) (thx) ]
question: the price increase we are seeing now in SBC world is driven only by memory price or CPU price is going up aswell for Rockchip/alwinner/etc?
The CPU price has not increased much. The real issue is that memory prices have risen significantly(10x), driving up total system cost and reducing demand. As volumes decline a lot, manufacturers have to increase their margins rate(in percentage of total cost) to maintain profitability.
The increase in CPU prices is driven more by the illegal tariffs enacted by Trump.
That is unfortunate to hear Radxa next jumping in with Qualcomm, who has for past 30+ years been all about closed phone ecosystem and still do not bother something as simple to upload their firmware to linux git for snapdragon laptops. That is direct statement from Qualcom to care only to work with proprietary Microsoft or Google. So even a low cost board from them is worthless when it eventually goes into the drawer unusable as wasted silicon. Why Radxa mention being open hardware but keep going with companies that are not open while there is NXP and STM that are very open source friendly so their boards are easier to bring up.
I suppose you have looked at the Linux kernel and seen which portions of Qualcomm SoCs are being supported. I also suppose you have insider information on the Qualcomm SoCs that Radxa is planning to use and how both companies plan to support them?
So much for AI being for our benefit.
What do you mean? It is clearly for our benefit, all the AI generated images, videos and music, all the lonely people forming emotional attachments, all the pollution, all the misinformation. Don’t you see it is all for our benefit.
Seriously though, outside of very niche use cases like labs finding new materials or treatments for medical conditions I don’t think general purpose, publicly accessible “AI” has really added anything of value.
And one more price update for the Zimaboard 2 (Intel N150) SBCs scheduled to take effect on May 25: