Two unannounced Raspberry Pi boards have surfaced in the Linux kernel tree, and the most interesting thing about them isn't what's new — it's what's deliberately old. Both the Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W and the Raspberry Pi 4 Model A are built around the Broadcom BCM2711, the same quad-core Cortex-A72 chip that has powered the Pi 4 Model B since 2019. This is a platform-extension strategy, not a generational leap. The Zero 3 W is the more consequential of the two. The Zero 2 W launched almost exactly five years ago with a quad-core 1GHz Cortex-A53 RP3A0. Dropping in the BCM2711 represents a significant per-core performance jump — the Cortex-A72 is a substantially more capable core than the A53. The obvious question is thermal: the BCM2711 isn't known for running cool, and the Zero form factor doesn't give heat anywhere to go. The device tree doesn't reveal clock speeds, so whether the chip runs at full Pi 4 clocks or gets dialed back remains unknown. The device tree also contains tantalizing hints that may not survive to production. An 8-bit bus width storage controller configuration suggests eMMC was at least considered, though the author's read — and it's a reasonable one — is that this is a development artifact rather than a shipping feature, since eMMC would push the price beyond what the Zero range can tolerate. More likely to ship: an SPI flash bootloader (bringing Pi 4-style boot options to the Zero line), a power button on GPIO 46, and the standard 40-pin GPIO layout preserving HAT compatibility. The Pi 4 Model A follows the traditional Model A formula with precision. Take the Model B, strip Ethernet, drop to a single HDMI output, remove the 3.5mm audio jack, and cut the price. The most interesting addition is external antenna support — two antenna control lines and overlay parameters matching the Compute Module 4's antenna-switching setup. For anyone deploying a Pi inside a metal enclosure, that's a genuinely useful feature. PCIe is enabled in the device tree, making USB 3 possible, though the precedent set by the 3 Model A+ (single USB-A port) suggests expectations should be modest. Neither device tree reveals RAM configurations, pricing, clock speeds, or release dates. Pricing is the critical unknown. Memory costs have been rising — the Raspberry Pi Foundation acknowledged this alongside the 1GB Pi 5 launch — and the Zero range in particular lives and dies by its price point. The BCM2711 is a mature chip, which helps on the silicon side, but building a Zero around it introduces thermal and cost constraints the RP3A0 didn't have. The strategic logic is sound. Rather than pushing everyone toward the Pi 5 (and its higher price), the Foundation is filling gaps in the Pi 4 ecosystem with boards that serve specific use cases: the Zero 3 W for embedded and IoT projects that need real compute in a tiny footprint, and the 4 Model A for desktop-adjacent uses that don't need Ethernet or dual displays. Both leverage a chip with six years of software maturity and driver support, which matters enormously in the embedded world. Kernel support landing ahead of any official announcement is a reliable signal that hardware isn't far off. The source code is public — the device tree files are bcm2711-rpi-zero-3-w.dts and bcm2711-rpi-4-a.dts — and while device trees can change before production, the broad strokes of both boards are now visible to anyone who reads them.
