The Raspberry Pi 4[1] is here — and it’s an awesome upgrade. Earlier rumors said that it would take a while before a major Raspberry Pi upgrade, but it’s available starting today.
When it comes to physical design, the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B looks a lot like the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, the previous flagship model. It’s a single-board computer with a lot of connectors that is the size of a deck 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 at 512MB or 1GB of RAM for years. For the first time, you can buy models with more memory if you want more memory. The base model still starts with 1GB of RAM. But you can optionally buy a model with 2GB RAM or even 4GB of RAM.
In addition to raw memory capacity, memory transfer speeds should be faster as the foundation is switching from LPDDR2 to LPDDR4.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation [2] has already sent me a Raspberry Pi 4 and I plan to run some benchmarks and share the results. I’m just waiting for the Raspbian update as the existing release doesn’t run on the new architecture — I realized that after formatting the microSD card to replace the pre-installed NOOBS operating system with Raspbian Lite (oopsie).
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.
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