It seems we are experiencing a shortage of Raspberry Pi’s here in the Netherlands. I myself am looking for model 3B/3B+, but can also manage with 4B.
The suppliers in the Netherlands that I know of (RS Components & Farnell) are all sold out. Their websites (and customer service) are even saying that the next batches will take as long as 1 year to arrive. This sounds absurd, right?
A few weeks ago I saw a blogpost from the Raspberry Pi foundation that they were experiencing shortages, but that production was still ongoing. They would however be focussing their production lines on certain models. This would imply that the production lines are still running right?
Hi Frans, I wish we had more information to provide you, but nope we are in the same situation as everyone else here. The chip shortage is really starting to impact a lot of projects.
I think I read some post of RPi that they did not wanted to put out a RPi 4A+ this year because of the shortage and to not make it worse by diversifying their platform too much. The chips are used for CM4 and RPi 4B+ now and I think they even needed to put in their own RPi Microcontroller into their new Lego product because of experiencing shortage themselves.
So - in short: I needed to acquire about 16 RPi 4B+ for a new project and needed to switch up from 2 GB to 4 GB models, just to get them. I guess 8 GB models will be more available, but all prices have gone through the roof, with some guys scalping on Amazon and Ebay.
We just need to wait this out, but as David said, this will not only be a problem for RPi but all components using microcontrollers and microelectronics. So… from your toaster to your devboards and pcs. I laughed a bit at the start of the year when they told me this will become that horrible, but I snagged some microcontrollers at that time for “bad times”. I am really happy about that decision at that time and wished I got some more SAM-D21 at that time ^^’’
They are now using the same silicon for the RPi 4B and CM4 modules - so I would think this would be the platform they try to push most. But this will also come with the problem that most people try to order these platforms as well. So I guess without real industry insight, this will be hard to answer.
I personally would think they would try to keep the commercial sector afloat, meaning CM3+ and CM4, along with the more “consumer” RPi 4B. In the most recent post by RPi about the normal overclock for newer RPi 4B to 1.8 GHz ( Bullseye bonus: 1.8GHz Raspberry Pi 4 - Raspberry Pi ) Eben Upton made clear that they see the non-CM modules as user centered ones and only the CMs as industrial products:
CM4 remains at 1.5GHz by default. With Compute Module we are much more focused on providing a stable, consistent, platform for our industrial customers than on pushing the performance envelope.
So if you want to develop a product for actual sale, using the CM3+ or CM4 (maybe even the CM3+ in a balenaFin) would probably be the most stable and acquirable platform right now. At least thats what I hope :). But again, only my two cents
We were trying to get 100s of thousands of CM3+ or CM4s for our application. When they weren’t available we wanted to go to 3B+ or 4B. We have basically been told that production is going to be unreliable at best throughout 2022.
My suggestion would be to first talk to some of the people on the “Approved Reseller” program such as Pimoroni, The Pi Hut and others.
However, in our case we are moving to the RockPi 4B, RockPi Zero and RockPi CM3 and are working with balena to add support for these devices.
If you do not specifically need the Pi for your application I’d be happy to put you in touch with the folks at RockPi
(And just to add, in my experience what @nmaas87 has said about the Raspberry Pi CMs is only true if you already have a relationship with them for large quantities, have only a relatively small need (few thousand) or you are capable of placing scheduled orders with 6+ months lead time)
