One intrepid hardware expert has managed to upgrade the Raspberry Pi 4 computer board to sport a massive 16GB of RAM, give or take.
This comes from YouTuber MadEDoctor, who increased the system memory attached to an entry-level Raspberry Pi 4 from 1GB to the mentioned 16GB, as shown in a video he just uploaded to his channel. The upgrade was done using a hot air rework station and very careful soldering.
As reported by Tom's Hardware(Opens in a new tab), he notes that MadEDoctor previously upgraded the Pi 4 to 8GB, but wanted to go a step further and double that memory configuration.
However, there is a considerable caveat here. The good news is that with the 16 GB installed, the Raspberry Pi 4 booted up and the boot screen showed that the 16 GB update was registered.
The bad news is that when booting the Raspberry Pi OS (the official distribution), the device crashed and got stuck on a black screen (unlike the previous 8 GB upgrade, which was quite successful).
MadEDoctor was able to start the RISC OS, but it only showed 4 GB of RAM present, not 16 GB.
Analysis: Stay tuned for more...
MadEDoctor seems confident that they will eventually be able to get the Pi 4 running on 16GB, and claims that there will be a "sure" follow-up video.
The hardware expert posted this clip for now, saying that it will likely take "some time to figure out the solution" to this issue. So don't expect anything to happen anytime soon, and we don't have any clues as to what the problem is.
Although MadEDoctor seems to be looking into whether the Raspberry Pi OS doesn't know how to handle a 16GB configuration and possible ways around it, at least by following the comments on the YouTube video.
Ultimately this is more of a fun exercise in what can be done, or should be possible soon we should say, rather than something practical, although some people may have niche use cases of the Pi where the device is It would benefit from having a lot more memory.