The Raspberry Pi Foundation has today surprisingly announce the availability of its new Raspberry Pi 4 mini PC equipped with 8GB of RAM. The long-rumoured 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 is now available, priced at just $75 or £75 depending on your location.
The original Raspberry Pi 4 was launched roughly 12 months ago and has sold nearly 3 million units worldwide. The BCM2711 chip that we use on Raspberry Pi 4 can address up to 16GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM, so the real barrier to our offering a larger-memory variant was the lack of an 8GB LPDDR4 package, says The Foundation. Eben Upton explains a little more.
“To supply the slightly higher peak currents required by the new memory package, James has shuffled the power supply components on the board, removing a switch-mode power supply from the right-hand side of the board next to the USB 2.0 sockets and adding a new switcher next to the USB-C power connnector. While this was a necessary change, it ended up costing us a three-month slip, as COVID-19 disrupted the supply of inductors from the Far East.”
“Our default operating system image uses a 32-bit LPAE kernel and a 32-bit userland. This allows multiple processes to share all 8GB of memory, subject to the restriction that no single process can use more than 3GB. For most users this isn’t a serious restriction, particularly since every tab in Chromium gets its own process. Sticking with a 32-bit userland has the benefit that the same image will run on every board from a 2011-era alpha board to today’s shiny new 8GB product.”
Raspberry Pi 4 specifications :
– Broadcom BCM2711, Quad core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5GHz
– 1GB, 2GB, 4GB or 8GB LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM (depending on model)
– 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz IEEE 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
– Gigabit Ethernet
– 2 USB 3.0 ports; 2 USB 2.0 ports.
– Raspberry Pi standard 40 pin GPIO header (fully backwards compatible with previous boards)
– 2 × micro-HDMI ports (up to 4kp60 supported)
– 2-lane MIPI DSI display port
– 2-lane MIPI CSI camera port
– 4-pole stereo audio and composite video port
– H.265 (4kp60 decode), H264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode)
– OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics
– Micro-SD card slot for loading operating system and data storage
– 5V DC via USB-C connector (minimum 3A*)
– 5V DC via GPIO header (minimum 3A*)
– Power over Ethernet (PoE) enabled (requires separate PoE HAT)
– Operating temperature: 0 – 50 degrees C ambient
Source : RPiF
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