News Attempt to upgrade Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of RAM results in a bricked Pi

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I know 16 GB is the technical limit for what the BCM2711 in Raspberry Pi 4 should be able to address. Is that also the case for the BCM2712 in Raspberry Pi 5?

If we see more in the future, it will be paired with an AI push.
 
Thanks for trying it out. I still don't understand why they have set this 8GB limit which I know for many is a dealbreaker - myself included.
 
tomwp said:
Thanks for trying it out. I still don't understand why they have set this 8GB limit which I know for many is a dealbreaker - myself included.
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What do you need more than 8 GB for? Wouldn't most applications needing more RAM benefit from using a faster processor too, like a mini PC?
 
To those who are really desperate for more RAM at a similiar economy I can only recommend the Orange Pi 5+ in the 16 or 32GB incarnations.

I got the RP5 with 8GB and the OP5+ with 32GB working together in a Proxmox cluster just fine, even if live-migration still isn't working, suspended VMs move just fine between them.

NVMe storage is four lanes of PCIe v3 quite naturally on the OP5+ as well and it comes with dual 2.5 Gbit NICs.

CPU performance between the two is pretty much on par, the extra 4 low-power cores do little for power but bridge the clock gap between the two.

The iGPU on the OP5+ is quite a notch above the RP5 and will do 4k 3D Google Maps rendering quite well as well as play 4k YouTube videos.

It's quite funny you can now get an OP5+ with 32GB of RAM at 1/4 price of a Snapdragon Elite, with only 16GB... but of course the CPU performance is in the Atom range.

I'm hoping for some Snapdragon Elite based SBC or NUC designs to come out with full Linux support, but they'd need to be well below €500 to have any appeal.
 
Conor Stewart said:
What do you need more than 8 GB for? Wouldn't most applications needing more RAM benefit from using a faster processor too, like a mini PC?
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Unless you buy from the fruity cult (or its imitators), RAM is a littlte more than $1/GB these days.

And in these SBCs it doesn't cost much in energy or in size. I got the 32GB variant of the Orange Pi 5+ for around €200 in one sale or another on AliExpress, very nearly the same price as the 16 or 8GB variants.

When double RAM costs less than a Starbucks coffee or three, your question doesn't make any sense to waste time on.

8GB may be fine for lots of things, but if you run out, paging is a true killjoy, even with 3GB/s NVMe x4 PCI v3 storage. On an SDcard it's just really, really painful and turns any RP5 into an RP3 or worse.

And of course a faster processsor would be nice, too. Unfortunately the band gap between the Atom class RP5/OP5+ and the next rung up the ARM ladder has only just appeared with the Snapdragon Elites and the price gap seems to be quite large compared to x86.
 
I'm guessing the firmware is just not setting the memory controller up properly, like maybe the "extra" 8GB is not getting memory refresh etc. from the memory controller. Too bad!
 
Why do people think that 16GB would even work - don't the resiter print on the board have 1 and 2 GB but not 16GB?
 
Jimboly said:
Why do people think that 16GB would even work - don't the resiter print on the board have 1 and 2 GB but not 16GB?
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Why would people think that it wouldn't work?!
If the CPU can see that much ram then it can see that much ram, if it doesn't it means that there is something on the board that is limiting the amount of ram visible to the CPU, and anything on the board can be changed by someone with enough experience.

People upgraded the RAM on many systems that don't support it by doing all sort of things up to writing a new bios that sees more ram in the case of the original xbox for example.
 
Hard to say. I mean, my Coffee Lake has 39 bits physical (512GB) but the chipset supports 64GB or possibly 128GB .

But, indeed, it's routine even on PCs to just spec them based on the number of RAM slots times largest memory avaialble AT THE TIME THE COMPUTER WAS MADE. I.e. there used to be all these Dells that claimed, say, 512MB maximum (because 128MB DIMMs were the largest available) but later on you could put 2GB in them (once 512MB DIMMs were available.) Or with my Coffee Lake -- the listed spec is 64GB but I'm uncertain if that's the real limit or based on the largest DIMMs available when the machine was made and it can actually take 128GB. This was reasonably common up to maybe 6 or 8 years ago -- less common now since RAM densities have increased a bit faster than (non-server) chipsets capabilities to handle larger DIMMs.

As a few have mentioned, the printing on the Pi board is just to indicate what it's equipped with, it's not some indication of maximum capacity.
 
Irrespective of the total address bus width, the RAM is limited by the MMU capabilities, not the bus width. So you might have a 34-bit memory controller on a 40-bit device like the A76. Why might that be? Silicon cost. Those extra lines take silicon area. IIRC, you also need more cache lines, and probably more cache to cope with the extra lines in the MMU, so it's a lot more expensive in area. If the MMU on the Pi 5 is 33bit then its limited to 8GB. I have no idea how many bits the MMU on the 2712 is though.
 
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