Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton confirmed that the Pi 5 chip processor is not coming next year, as the company is just starting to heal from two years of "supply chain hell."
Amid the Supply Chain Crisis
In a report by ZD Net, Upton said this week on the ExplainingComputers podcast that Raspberry Pi is unlikely to produce a Raspberry Pi 5 in 2023 owing to the continuing supply chain recovery.
"So I think don't expect a Pi 5 next year. Next year is a recovery year," he stated.
In response to high demand, Upton informed Pi enthusiasts last week that it had been able to reserve "a little over a hundred thousand" units of the Zero W, Pi 3A+, and the 2GB and 4GB varieties of the Raspberry Pi 4 for single-unit sales in time for the Christmas season.
Upton said that the company still needs to catch up on orders from its commercial clients. It faces a backlog and difficulty renewing stock with resellers supplying individual developers.
Pi Zero and Zero W would be more widely accessible before the Pi 3A+ because of the latter's lower commercial demand. As usual, the Raspberry Pi 4's unrestricted availability will come last, maybe at the end of the third quarter of 2023.
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No Upcoming Product in 2023
With regard to the Pi 5 topic, Upton said that everyone had been slowed down by supply chain concerns ever since the Covid-19 pandemic.
The CEO claimed it would be beneficial to take a year off before introducing anything new to "recover."
If a Pi 5 is not introduced in 2023, the Pi 4 (which debuted in June 2019) would have been in service the longest of any Pi platform to date, despite having benefited from multiple upgrades.
Upton mentioned that introducing a Pi 5 would be risky as it can prevent the full recovery of the Pi 4 supply, despite the fact that the Pi 5 will be built using a different manufacturing node.
Furthermore, it may result in a fumbling Pi 5 release.
Since it had already allocated BCM2711 silicon supply for the then-new Raspberry Pi 400, supplies of the 28nm BCM2711 component used in Raspberry Pi 4 and Compute Module 4 held up in the early stages of the worldwide chip shortage.
Its earlier products, which employed 40nm components, were giving the company trouble.
Upton believes that a true nightmare is if they attempted to offer some type of Raspberry Pi 5 product next year and may not ramp adequately due to some limitations, he said.
Although the release of Pi 5 is more likely in 2024, Pi enthusiasts should not give up hope before then.
Upton reassured customers that they could begin planning for a reasonable Raspberry Pi 5 platform by the second part of 2024.
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