I woke up to news from the Raspberry Pi store about Raspberry Pi 4 8GB of RAM edition. That’s right, the speediest board get’s twice the RAM. An upgrade many of you were very keen to see. I’m writing this and at the same time I follow the steps of the online check out at ThePiHut.com.
Raspberry Pi 4 8GB RAM
Since the release, Raspberry Pi 4 went through a couple of iterations. First, the board suffered from USB-C design flaw which would prevent smart charges from correctly recognising the board. It was an issue resolved promptly in the next revision.
For a while, the community went to town with heating solutions for Raspberry Pi 4 boards, as the microcomputer was running pretty hot – something that got eventually patched software-wise.
Next, the model with the lowest memory (1GB) had been dropped in favour of the 2GB one while retaining the attractive price. The team behind the Raspberry Pi 4 is working on adding a full “boot from USB” feature which is currently in beta and now we are treated to a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB RAM version of the board for £74.
Hardware changes
On the board you will find 8GB of faster LPDDR4 RAM. The BCM2711 chip used Raspberry Pi 4 can address up to 16GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM and up until now, 8GB packages weren’t available (presumably at the price that the foundation was looking for). In theory, we could expect 16GB version in the future, but the real question is: will the CPU benefit from that upgrade?
To power up extra RAM on Raspberry Pi 4 8GB RAM edition, the PCB went through a minor redesign.
64-bit
The new Raspberry Pi 4 8GB RAM board comes with a hint of software changes too. While the Raspberry Pi foundation is keen on keeping the 32bit OS compatible across all boards released to date, there is a beta build that fans of 64bit computing can try.
Lastly, say goodbye to Raspbian, and say hello to Raspberry Pi OS as this is the new name for Raspberry Pi operating system.
I think I know what Raspberry Pi will end up in the seriously handsome Argon ONE case! Go on, get yours here. Any ideas what should I test? Let me know in this Reddit thread.
