Raspberry Pi 6 Slips to 2028 as DRAM Crunch Reshapes the Roadmap

At a Reddit AMA, Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton pushed Pi 6 expectations out to early 2028 at the soonest, breaking the roughly three-to-four year cadence of prior launches. The delay is largely market-driven: a global DRAM shortage, fueled by AI accelerator demand vacuuming up wafer capacity, makes launching a fresh SBC at the $50 Pi 5 price point untenable. When the Pi 6 does arrive, it will lean on raw improvements rather than new silicon blocks — faster CPU and IO, no NPU, with Upton framing the CPU itself as the venue for AI workloads.

The same wafer scarcity is squeezing the low end. Pi Zero 2 W shortages stem from substrate supply pressure on older process nodes, and a Pi Zero 3 isn’t imminent because faster CPUs may not tolerate the stacked RAM die that keeps the board single-sided, while newer LPDDR pricing blows past the $15 target. The decade-old Pi 3B is still moving roughly a million units a year as a cheaper fallback.

On microcontrollers, James Adams said power and security were the hardest parts of the RP2350, with a silicon respin fixing a current leakage bug. MCU shipments overtook Pi SBC sales in 2025. Pico boards stick with micro USB on cost grounds. CTO Gordon Hollingworth committed 95% of software engineering effort to libraries, drivers, and kernels — the software moat that keeps buyers paying a premium over cheaper clones.