Raspberry Pi 4 is Here, Now, Early!

By Martin L, on 24th June 2019

24th Jun 2019 at 7:00 am: Eben Upton makes a surprise announcement for the Raspberry Pi 4!

This is indeed a “surprise”… The expected cadence of new versions of the Raspberry Pi suggested that the v4 would be appearing sometime mid 2020 or later… However, as noted in the announcement blog:

We budgeted time for four silicon revisions of BCM2711 (A0, B0, C0, and C1); in comparison, we ship BCM2835C2 (the fifth revision of that design) on Raspberry Pi 1 and Zero.

Fortunately, [the version] 2711B0 has turned out to be production-ready, which has taken roughly 9–12 months out of the schedule.

Fantastic stuff! And the specs and reviews show a very meaningful boost in performance and features. All still for their target $35!!

Plus, their ever expanding community grows ever further!

Tremendous!

Enjoy:

• RaspberryPi.org: Raspberry Pi 4 – Your tiny, dual-display, desktop computer … and robot brains, smart home hub, media centre, networked AI core, factory controller, and much more
• mythic-beasts.com: Raspberry Pi on Raspberry Pi – “… We’ve set up 14 Pi 4s for PHP processing for the main website… We once advised Eben that Raspberry Pi probably wouldn’t sell very many computers. He didn’t listen to us then either. We haven’t moved the entire [RaspberryPi.org website] stack to the Pi 4. The front-end load balancers, download and apt servers are still on non-Pi hardware, split across three data centres… If you like the idea of Pi 4 in the cloud, a Pi 4 VM in the cloud or 64 bit ARM in the cloud, tell us your plans…”
• Phoronix.com: Raspberry Pi 4 Announced With Dual HDMI, USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, V3D Driver Stack
• TechRadar.com: Raspberry Pi 4 is on sale with 3x faster CPU and dual 4K monitor support for $35
• TheRegister.co.uk: Go fourth and multi-Pi: Raspberry Pi 4 lands today with quad 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, up to 4GB RAM… – “Those new to the Pi will, however, have a much better experience thanks to Linux simply being a bit happier with that critical extra bit of RAM and CPU with which to play. IoT vendors, on the other hand, will be intrigued by the potential to create ever more intelligent edge devices thanks to the additional power while the dual 4K outputs will have digital signage flingers positively rubbing their hands in glee.”
• tom’sHardware.com: Raspberry Pi 4 Review: The New Gold Standard for Single-Board Computing (Includes some benchmarks.)
• Gareth Halfacree: Benchmarking the Raspberry Pi 4 (Lots of benchmarks.)
• Pimoroni.com: Buy – Raspberry Pi 4
• ThePiHut.com: Buy – Raspberry Pi 4

Looks good!

Enjoy 🙂

RaspberryPi

3 comments to Raspberry Pi 4 is Here, Now, Early!

• Martin L

  26/06/2019 at 5:33 pm Log in to Reply

  Want to go faster with the Raspberry Pi 4? 😉

  See: Overclocking the Raspberry Pi 4

  Includes various benchmarks to show what can be done…

   

  The BBC have their own article for the new Raspberry Pi: The Raspberry Pi goes Fourth

  My, hasn’t it grown. It started as a modest project to get a few thousand children coding but has since become the best-selling computer ever made in the UK…

  … “It feels like a coming of age for us,” says Raspberry Pi’s founder Eben Upton. “It’s 40 times as powerful as the original Pi and it’s the first time that we’re shipping a device that, for most users, will be subjectively indistinguishable from a traditional desktop computer.”

  What has also changed is that as well as the basic £34 model you can pay up to £54 for a device with more RAM – perhaps designed to be attractive to commercial users rather than schools.

  You can also pay more for kits with all you need to turn it into a desktop computer – something that seemed pretty daunting to some who bought early versions of the Pi for their children. I was supplied with a kit a few days ago, and over the weekend managed – without any help from a young person – to get it up and running…

  … In 2015 the Raspberry Pi foundation merged with Code Club and it now employs more than 100 people, compared with the 50 working on the commercial side.

  Mr Upton, who runs the commercial division, is keen to stress that education is still at the heart of the project. “We hope to see the Raspberry Pi 4 in school computer labs, after-school clubs and children’s bedrooms across the UK, and indeed the world.”…

   

  Enjoy! 🙂

• Martin L

  01/07/2019 at 7:20 pm Log in to Reply

  Along with the new Raspberry Pi 4, the Raspberry Pi team also released a new spin of their Raspbian OS:

  Buster – the new version of Raspbian

  … The first thing to mention about Buster (who was the actual dog in Pixar’s “Toy Story” films, as opposed to the toy one made out of a Slinky…) is that we are actually releasing it slightly in advance of the official Debian release date. The reason for this is that one of the important new features of Raspberry Pi 4 is that the open-source OpenGL video driver is now being used by default, and this was developed using the most recent version of Debian…

  … There are no huge differences between Debian Stretch and Debian Buster. … most of the differences are security changes designed to make Buster harder to hack. Any other differences are mostly small incremental changes that most people won’t notice…

  … The overall appearance of the desktop hasn’t changed significantly for a few years, and was starting to look a bit dated, so we thought it would be nice to give the appearance a mild refresh for Buster. Then people would at least be able to see that their shiny new operating system looked different from the old one!…

   

  And further to the great furore for the Raspberry Pi 4 announcement, here’s a few more links of goodies:

  Raspberry Pi 4 Tech Specs

  Setting up your Raspberry Pi

  The NEW Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide: updated for Raspberry Pi 4

  The MagPi Issue 83 – Introducing Raspberry Pi 4

  Raspberry Pi 15.3W USB-C Power Supply

  Raspberry Pi 4 Desktop Kit

  Raspberry Pi 4: 48 hours later

  (The Raspberry Pi books and magazines can be bought, or they can be downloaded for free as a PDF.)

   

  There’s some good and amazing interest there! All looks good! 🙂

  Enjoy!

• Martin L

  15/07/2019 at 10:41 pm Log in to Reply

  Here’s a few more snippets following the surprise Raspberry Pi 4 splash:

   

  Raspberry Pi 4 AMA: Founder Eben Upton Answers Your Burning Questions

  In honor of the Raspberry Pi 4 launch, last week the Tom’s Hardware Community Team held a 48 hour AMA session with Raspberry Pi founder and CEO, Eben Upton. Eben and his team at Raspberry Pi spearheaded the push into affordable single board computing, and in a large part responsible for the product category’s explosive growth over the past few years. We received a large number of helpful questions and informative answers…

   

  Raspberry Pi 4 Cooling Review: Pimoroni Heatsink and Fan Shim Tested

  The Raspberry Pi 4 is a powerful beast, running considerably warmer than its predecessors. While the official Raspberry Pi Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) HAT add-on includes a built-in fan that can cool things down, there are cheaper options for those who don’t need PoE support – like a passive heatsink or active Fan Shim accessory from Pimoroni…

   

  Really awesome Raspberry Pi 4 X-ray radiographs

  … “I work for a company that makes microfocus X-ray/CT systems!” xCP23x explained in their Reddit post. “Most of the images are from a 225kV system (good down to 3 microns).”…

   

  Your Back-to-School Bootcamp with our free online training

  Pump up your programming skills for free

  Today we are excited to announce our new online training course Programming with GUIs — now open for sign-ups on FutureLearn. To celebrate, we’ve also curated a set of courses as your personal Back-to-school Bootcamp. Sign up now to start training from Monday 29 July and throughout August!…

   

  Code your own path-following Lemmings in Python | Wireframe issue 17

  Learn how to create your own obedient lemmings that follow any path put in front of them. Raspberry Pi’s own Rik Cross explains how…

   

  That’s a good mix of stuff! There is good interesting comment from Eben, especially that their original intention to boost the numbers of entrants to university computer courses in the UK appears to have come true (at least so for the numbers for Computer Science at his University of Cambridge). The X-ray/CT scans make for a good spooky desktop background! 🙂 And note that (all?) the Raspberry Pi Foundation publications can be bought or freely downloaded as PDFs.

  Enjoy! 🙂