The Raspberry Pi Foundation unveils the Raspberry Pi 4
| Wayne Chen
The Raspberry Pi 4 is here - this is a great upgrade. Earlier there was a rumor that it took a while before the Raspberry Pi made a major upgrade, but it will be available from today.
In terms of physical design, the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B looks a lot like the previous flagship model Raspberry Pi 3 Model B +. It is a single board computer with many connectors and the same size as a pair of cards.
But everything has been updated. It starts with a faster system-on-a-chip. The processor now uses the Cortex-A72 architecture (quad-core 64-bit ARMv8 at 1.5GHz). It supports H.265 hardware video decoding for instance.
The Raspberry Pi has been stuck on 512MB or 1GB of RAM for years. If you want more memory, you can purchase a model with more memory for the first time. The basic model still starts with 1GB of RAM. But you can choose to buy a model with 2GB RAM or even 4GB RAM.
In addition to the raw memory capacity, when the base is switched from LPDDR2 to LPDDR4, the memory transfer speed should be faster.
When it come to connectivity, the two big changes are that you now get true Gigabit Ethernet (instead of Ethernet over USB 2.0). It should open up a ton of potential use cases for servers and headless Raspberry Pi devices.
There are now two USB 3.0 ports and two USB 2.0 ports. And you now get a USB-C port for the power brick. Bluetooth is also getting an update from Bluetooth 4.2 to Bluetooth 5.0.
The final big hardware change is that the full-size HDMI port is gone. You now get two micro-HDMI ports, which let you plug two 4K displays at 60 frames per second using one Raspberry Pi. I haven’t tested that setup yet.
The rest of the specifications should look familiar to anybody who has used a Raspberry Pi in the past. There’s a microSD card slot so that you can put the operating system and user data on a memory card. There’s a 40-pin GPIO header that should be compatible with existing add-on boards.
The product is launching today through authorized Raspberry Pi retailers. The base model still costs $35, while the 2GB RAM model costs $45 and the 4GB RAM model costs $55.
While the Raspberry Pi first started as a simple computer designed to teach kids how to code, it has become a versatile device with many different use cases.
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