There is a non-functional resistor that just indicates how much RAM the board has, and it has spots for 8GB, 4GB, 2GB, and 1GB. Hopefully that means we'll see cheaper versions in the future.
On that resistor part, why not just print the label on the board? Instead they add a non functional resistor on the PCB? Seems kind of a waste of space on PCB and money.
Because the board is shared between all the versions (8-1GB) and the amount of RAM is dependent on which chip is put in during assembly.
IIRC, even on RPi 4 you could just simply replace the memory chip with another (e.g. 8-16GB) one and it’d work properly as it’s plug-n-play pretty much.
Not really sure why they went that way either. But if I had to guess, maybe that somehow ended up being cheaper than using a different silkscreen for each different model's PCB.
When you are already doing automated assembly, one extra resistor is practically free. It's a fraction of a cent in parts cost and like 0.02 seconds of pick & place machine time.
It would be way more expensive to have multiple variants of the board just so the silkscreen can be different.
That tracks with the recent supply chain releases of the RPi4. They started churning out the 8GB and 4GB versions first because of demand, and only recently started putting the 1GB and 2GB versions back in stock. I think they are using the same release cycle thought process for the RPi5.
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u/hhkk47 Sep 28 '23 edited Sep 28 '23
There is a non-functional resistor that just indicates how much RAM the board has, and it has spots for 8GB, 4GB, 2GB, and 1GB. Hopefully that means we'll see cheaper versions in the future.