Double the RAM, Half the Stress: Raspberry Pi 4’s Secret Design Overhaul to Combat the 2026 Memory Crisis

Raspberry Pi has announced a revised pricing strategy driven by a global memory scarcity, a move intended to keep its hardware affordable as memory procurement costs rise. The company has unveiled a modified Model 4B with a redesigned circuit board prepared for a dual-memory module configuration, allowing for cheaper, lower-density memory silicon from a broader range of suppliers.

The dual-memory design is claimed to keep software and peripherals fully compatible, with some components repositioned to accommodate the secondary memory, and a new bootloader, pieeprom-2026-01-09[.]bin, enables OS access to the extra memory bank. Production costs are expected to be stabilised further, and the dual-memory approach may be rolled out across other products, meaning consumers could see both single- and dual-module versions in shops.

Distinguishing the dual-memory variant is an auxiliary RAM chip on the reverse side of the PCB and the “Raspberry Pi 2025” insignia on the front, while running cat /proc/cpuinfo in a terminal will identify it as Revision 1.5. The article notes that users should ensure they have the latest Linux kernel or Raspberry Pi OS for optimal performance. Published on 9 February 2026.