Raspis With Double The RAM In The Wild

There is buzz all over the reddits and Element 14 discussion boards about an updated version of the Raspberry Pi that bumps the amount of RAM from 256 MB to 512 MB.

This new update comes after the announcement of an upgraded version of the yet-to-be-released Raspi Model A (from 128 MB of RAM to 256 MB), and a few slight modifications to the Model B that include fixing a few hardware bugs (nothing serious) and adding mounting holes.

After perusing the Element 14 and Raspberry Pi discussion boards, a few things become apparent. Firstly, it appears this new upgrade to double the amount of RAM was initiated by manufacturers. It seems 512 MB RAM chips are cheap enough now to include in the Raspi without impacting the cost of components. Secondly, 512 MB seems to be the upper limit for the Raspberry Pi, at least for this iteration of hardware. Not enough address lines, they say, but you’re welcome to try and hack your own RAM to a Raspi CPU.

So far, attentive Raspi enthusiasts have found Raspberry Pis with double the amount of RAM on the UK Farnell site and the Australian Element 14 site. Nothing so far on the US Element 14 site, although we’ll gladly update this post when a Hackaday reader finds the relevant link.

EDIT: Here’s the link for the US version of Newark. No, there aren’t any in stock. Also, Hackaday beat the official Farnell/Element 14/Newark press release and the Raspberry Pi blog to the punch. Woo, go us.

33 thoughts on “Raspis With Double The RAM In The Wild

    1. Who needs Windows when you have OSX. Who needs OSX when you have Linux. Who needs Linux when you have OS2. Who needs OS2 when you have BeOS. Who needs BeOS when you have Android. Who needs Android when you have MobLin, etc…

      Everyone has a favourite {whatever}.

      The Pis are designed to be used in education as a learning tool so there should start to be educational material to back them up which does not appear to be the case with the A10s.

    2. rockchip = lying chinese bastards
      they lied about sharing code, sending old broken stuff instead.

      soo, who needs 2 A8 1.6GHz cores with super fast quad core GPU when you cant do shit on it doe to broken hv video decoder code freesing every couple frames and non working X11 due to lack of mali drivers? :/ /sad

    1. I can’t believe that after a 12 week wait with a 4 week delay tagged onto that, then anothervdelay, because I have moved house since I ordered, they ship mine out on the Friday before they start shipping upgrades. Thank a f*****g bunch, R.S.

      I’m thinking of returning it, asking for a refund, then going to element14.

    2. So – I’m not the only one?
      I ordered mine in JUNE, and it has yet to arrive. I decided to cancel the order, only to be told “it has already shipped”. (now delays will get blamed on shipping, right?)

      I have ordered from element14, the question becomes: which will turn up first? Lucky I have a Beaglebone to keep me amused while I wait (it’s a wee ripper, too).

  1. Who needs an alwinner when you’ve got a pi with source code?

    Who needs an alwinner with it’s community of 5 when you’ve got the pi community?

    Who needs an alwinner when all their community can do is troll the raspberry pi?

  2. Cool, now maybe we can run Crysis on it :)

    Just a thought, but what is the OC’ing record for an unmodified Pi? I have a cunning plan to preload the maps data onto a 4*16GB (maxed out) SD with soft switching, then use a Peltier on the chip with a fairly large heatsink + fan to drop CPUtemp down to about 2 Celsius ie above the icing point.

    1 GHz is the thermal limit so assuming the chipset can take it, swapping out the crystal then doing some kludge-fu on the HDMI and / or video out by running it through a frame converter to allow display to run at the increased clock.
    Alternate idea, use an LCD panel as these seem to tolerate higher frame rates quite well.

    A little tip, it seems that the software limits capacity to 16GB for unknown reasons probably so older cards work fine, maybe someone can do a “turbo boost” button that allows larger cards to work.

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