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.
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.
See Also: Japan, Netherlands Join US in Chip War Against China
