Raspberry Pi Shares Jump 30% as Demand Surges; Boards Now Locked to Original RAM Size

For the half, revenue jumped 90% to $256.9 million, adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $40.3 million, and profit before tax leapt 216% to $19.6 million, according to the report. Direct unit shipments rose 26% to 3.4 million, total unit shipments climbed 17% to 4.2 million, and the customer order backlog doubled to 2.6 million units during the half.

The results were underpinned by an acceleration in OEM adoption, with demand particularly robust in the Smart Home and Aerospace and Defence segments. Raspberry Pi also launched the AI HAT+ 2 for Raspberry Pi 5, extending its edge-AI product line.

DRAM prices have been increasing everywhere, and Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton said new customers who required computers or microcontrollers to manufacture other technologies were choosing Raspberry Pi's computers because they had a better inventory of components than competitors. “There's always that choice for an original equipment manufacturer as to whether they should ‘make’ or ‘buy’ the computer elements of their platforms,” Upton said. “The supply chain disruption is making ‘make’ a much harder choice and it's making the cost of repair a much harder choice. So we're seeing strength there.”

Raspberry Pi has already increased its suppliers of DRAM more than threefold, Upton said, according to the report. He said the increased demand had led to its backlog for units doubling to 2.6 million, which meant production rates would need to increase to prevent the numbers from getting ‘unhealthy’. New production capacity at the manufacturing facility in Pencoed, Wales, was expected to come online this week.

Exports were almost evenly split between North America, Europe and the rest of the world, which was primarily China, where demand was growing. Analysts at Peel Hunt said the company was ‘well positioned for rapid growth in unit shipments in 2027 and beyond,’ with demand expected from enthusiasts as well as the AI and security sectors.

In other news, Hackaday noted that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has pushed binary-blob bootloader changes that limit the ability to upgrade RAM on Pi 4 and Pi 5 boards as well as Compute Modules. The change locks devices to their original RAM size, although it does not restrict replacing the RAM chip with a chip of a similar size, so it does not prevent repair but somewhat limits repair part choice at most, according to the report.

Hackaday said the restriction is easily bypassable. The bootloader is stored in the SPI flash chip, which can be reflashed using the built-in mask ROM over USB and rpiboot, and users are not prevented from flashing older versions of the bootloader, so far. If someone manually swaps the RAM chip, they need to downgrade the bootloader to the last known good release, dated 2024-09-10, and then the Pi board or Compute Module will function with upgraded RAM. For most regular use, a two-year-old bootloader version would not really matter, the report said.

The bootloader change happened almost exactly two years ago, at some point between September 10 and September 23, 2024, according to Hackaday. The Raspberry Pi Foundation justifies it by saying it saw third-party resellers sourcing low-RAM Compute Modules and upgrading them with RAM from unknown sources and unknown stability. Slashdot observed that those resellers would also be reselling the modules at a markup for purely commercial gain while undercutting the foundation, which would otherwise direct that money into research and development. That creates perverse incentives and risk for people buying Raspberry Pi boards online, and the foundation decided to limit the practice primarily for users' benefit, plus some of its own, the item said.

The related GitHub issues have a fair few pingbacks, and exploring them made the problem look grim to the Slashdot writer. The advice was not to lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they are only slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the main audience turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online, and in most cases repair does not seem to be impeded, either. Users will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM chips are at their highest, according to the item. Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2011 and 2016.