Raspberry Pi Zero 3W Specs Leak: Pi 4 Chip, Release Date and Why It Won't Be $15

The Raspberry Pi Zero 3W now has a device tree, and it says the board runs on the BCM2711, the same quad Cortex-A72 chip as the Pi 4. I don't see a way it costs $15 like the Zero 2W, and the reason is the LPDDR4 that chip needs, which Raspberry Pi says has gone up sevenfold in a year.

I went through the new .dts files to see what they actually confirm about Zero 3W specs and what's still guesswork (clock, RAM, price, release date). I also pulled published Pi 4 benchmarks to get a rough idea of how fast it could run a small LLM, and whether you should just buy a Zero 2W now.

Where the Raspberry Pi Zero 3W leak came from

Phoronix covered it too, but bret.dk wrote the detailed breakdown on 27 October 2026. Two device tree source files written by Marta Momotko were merged into Raspberry Pi's own kernel tree, the rpi-6.18.y branch of raspberrypi/linux, through PR #7711 on 25 October 2026. They aren't in mainline Linux, and Raspberry Pi hasn't announced either board. The links below point at the original commits on the martamomotko/linux fork.

• Zero 3W: bcm2711-rpi-zero-3-w.dts, commit 1afad193
• Pi 4 Model A: bcm2711-rpi-4-a.dts, commit c17dd5f6

The Zero 3W file is very direct about what it describes:

compatible = "raspberrypi,model-zero-3-w", "brcm,bcm2711";
model = "Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W";

Zero 3W specs: confirmed vs. guesswork

A device tree describes how the board is wired. It doesn't cover clocks, RAM or price, so I've split what's in the file from what isn't.

The 8-bit bus width caught my eye. microSD only uses 4 data lines, so an 8-bit bus points to eMMC. Bret thinks it's a leftover and expects microSD on the final board. That could be right, but I'd keep an eye out for an eMMC SKU, because a Zero with soldered storage would make sense for industrial buyers.

The Pi 4 Model A file is the boring sibling. It has a disabled Ethernet controller, one HDMI, no analogue audio or composite, microSD only, and antenna-switching lines (ANT_CTRL1/ANT_CTRL2, overlay params ant1, ant2, noant) that look a lot like the CM4's internal/external antenna option.

Raspberry Pi Zero 3W release date

No date has been announced. A device tree merged into Raspberry Pi's kernel means bring-up work is happening, but that doesn't tell you when boards will ship. Anyone quoting a month is guessing. The Zero 2W launched about five years ago and the last Model A was the 3A+ in 2018, so a refresh is overdue.

The $15 Zero 3W problem: LPDDR4 prices

The Zero 2W still costs $15 and hasn't gone up during the RAM crunch. Raspberry Pi's own April 2026 pricing post explains why. The LPDDR2 used in the Zero, Zero 2W and Pi 3 comes from stock the company already holds. The LPDDR4 used in the Pi 4 and Pi 5 has seen "a seven-fold increase over the last year".

That same post put another $25 on the Pi 4 4GB, $50 on the 8GB, and launched a 3GB Pi 4 at $83.75.

The BCM2711 uses LPDDR4, so the Zero 3W lands on the memory whose price went up sevenfold instead of the LPDDR2 Raspberry Pi already has in a warehouse. I'd bet on a 512MB or 1GB base model at a price that makes people angry in the comments. On the HN thread, one commenter points out that an Orange Pi Zero used to cost less than $10 and now sells for a tad over $30.

Can the Zero 3W run an LLM? Pi 4 numbers are the ceiling

There are no Zero 3W benchmarks because there's no Zero 3W yet. But it uses the same SoC as the Pi 4, and a small, passively cooled board almost certainly won't beat a Pi 4. So published Pi 4 numbers are a reasonable upper bound.

The most useful dataset I found is SimeonOnSecurity's Ollama runs on a 2GB Pi 4B. The runs used five prompts, a 140-token output cap, and cold loads:

For comparison, the Adafruit guide measured gemma3:1b at 9.99 tok/s on an 8GB Pi 5, and SimeonOnSecurity got 11.2 tok/s on its 8GB Pi 5. That's the same model that swapped a 2GB Pi 4 into a reboot at 4.0 tok/s.

On the Zero 2W, the pi-llm project got llama.cpp working with SmolLM2-135M at Q4_K_M. It managed 9.5 to 10.9 tok/s generation, needed a mandatory 2GB swapfile, and took about 24 hours to compile on the board. The README warns that larger models may not run at all.

What I take from those numbers:

1. RAM matters more than the A72 cores. Gemma 3 1B was already swapping and rebooting a 2GB Pi 4. If the Zero 3W ships with 512MB or 1GB, 1B-class models will be painful or won't load.
2. Models from 230M to 500M are where it'll work. LFM2.5-230M at 12.8 tok/s, or LFM2.5-350M and Qwen2.5-0.5B at around 8 tok/s, on Pi 4 silicon is fine for intent parsing, short summaries or a voice-assistant command layer. I wouldn't chat with it.
3. Over the Zero 2W, you mostly gain model size. The Zero 2W gets about 10 tok/s from a 135M model; Pi 4 silicon with enough RAM should get similar speed from a model about 3x bigger. That's worth having, since the pi-llm README admits its 135M model's responses "can be repetitive or incoherent".

If you want a 1B model on a Pi today, buy a Pi 5. Boring answer, but that's what the numbers say.

Buy a Zero 2W now or wait for the Zero 3W?

My take:

• Buy the Zero 2W now if your project is GPIO, sensors, a Pi-hole, a USB gadget, or anything that already runs fine on it. It costs $15, it's in stock, and the price is protected by LPDDR2 stock. A Zero 3W probably won't help a temperature logger.
• Wait if you're hitting the 512MB wall, need PCIe or 4-lane CSI, or want a small on-device model. Expect to pay more.
• Skip both if you want local LLMs. Get a Pi 5 with at least 4GB. HN commenters also bring up Rockchip boards like the Radxa Zero 3W, though one owner there says its Cortex-A55 cores are only slightly better than the Zero 2W's A53s.

If you already have a Zero 2W and want to try a tiny model, don't compile on the board. Build on a faster ARM64 machine or cross-compile, copy the binary over, and add swap first. On a Bookworm-based Raspberry Pi OS image that still uses dphys-swapfile:

sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff
sudo sed -i 's/^CONF_SWAPSIZE=.*/CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048/' /etc/dphys-swapfile
sudo dphys-swapfile setup && sudo dphys-swapfile swapon
free -h

Then run a model in the SmolLM2-135M class with -t 4, and watch vcgencmd get_throttled while it generates. On a Zero, thermals will start to matter before model quality does.

So what's it for?

I like the idea of a Pi 4 chip in a Zero footprint, and it's overdue. With LPDDR4 at current prices, though, I doubt it'll be the cheap hacking board people on HN want. My guess is a small, pricier board for camera rigs, PCIe experiments and edge projects that have outgrown 512MB.

What would you build with a Zero 3W that the Zero 2W was too slow for? And at what price do you skip it for a Pi 5 or an ESP32? Tell me in the comments. I especially want to hear from people running models on a Zero 2W today.

Sources

• bret.dk: Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W and Pi 4 Model A on the way?
• Zero 3W device tree, commit 1afad193
• Pi 4 Model A device tree, commit c17dd5f6
• raspberrypi/linux PR #7711
• Hacker News discussion
• Raspberry Pi: a new 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 for $83.75, and more memory-driven price increases
• SimeonOnSecurity: AI models on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5
• Adafruit: Local LLMs on Raspberry Pi
• ravijo/pi-llm: llama.cpp on Pi Zero 2W