Raspberry Pi has spent two years telling anyone who asks that memory prices are the binding constraint on everything it builds. Now there is evidence of what that looks like in the roadmap.
Device-tree source files — the kernel descriptions of a board's hardware that must exist before Linux can boot on it — describe two boards Raspberry Pi has never announced: a Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W and a Raspberry Pi 4 Model A. Both, according to the files, are built on the Broadcom BCM2711 or a variant of it. That is the chip that arrived with the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B in 2019: four ARM Cortex-A72 cores.
The Zero 3 W would succeed the Zero 2 W from 2021, a board whose cleverness was a package-level trick: the RP3A0 combined a BCM2837 (four Cortex-A53 cores) with 512 MB of LPDDR2 in a single package to save board area and cost. At launch it cost €16 and was enough for a great many projects. Today it is hard to buy at all.
Whether Raspberry Pi has built an equivalent combination package out of the BCM2711 and an LPDDR4 die is not visible in the files — and neither is whether the Zero 3 W finally replaces micro-USB with USB-C.
The Pi 4 Model A follows a template the company used in 2019 with the Pi 3 Model A+: keep the SoC and the RAM of the bigger board, then strip connectors and board area to cut manufacturing cost. The device-tree file points to a single HDMI output instead of two, with no Ethernet and no analog audio jack.
Context for why this is the interesting direction: the cheapest Pi 4 Model B, with 1 GB, starts around €40 in retail. The 2, 4 and 8 GB versions run from €80 to €165. heise frames the leak explicitly against what it calls horrendous RAM prices, which have made several Raspberry Pi variants unaffordable — the same memory market that produced SK Hynix's 80% operating margin this week, on production sold out through 2029.
Two routes lead to a cheaper board. One is newer, denser memory; the other is older silicon with cheap DRAM and fewer connectors. The device-tree files suggest Raspberry Pi took the second. What they do not reveal is the launch date, the RAM configuration or the price. The company has announced nothing at all.
Treat this as strong circumstantial evidence rather than a product launch: device-tree entries are added when engineers prepare a board for the kernel, usually well before a press release, and they have leaked unreleased models before. Compiled by the site bret.dk, the files are the closest thing to a roadmap the company has published in months.
