What began as a rumor becomes reality. This morning [Eben Upton] announced that the newest flavor of the Raspberry Pi 4 comes with 8 gigabytes of RAM and a sticker price of $75, roughly twice that of the base model which is now pegged at 2 GB of ram.
Originally released on June 23rd of last year, the Pi 4 came with three different options for 1, 2, or 4 GB of memory. But just a few days later, Hackaday reported on an Easter egg in the user guide that referenced an 8 GB option.
So why didn’t this version get released in 2019? That’s the crazy thing about this story. In the announcement [Eben] mentions that the Pi’s design is capable of addressing up to 16 GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM (we say bring it, but that’s a discussion for a different day). It took a year to get here because there wasn’t a source available for this 8 gig version until Micron began manufacturing the chip earlier this year.
Also addressed in this announcement is a looming changeover that was bound to happen eventually: the move from 32-bit to 64-bit operating systems on the Pi. While a 32-bit image can access all of this larger memory across multiple process, it can’t devote more than 3 GB to a single Linux process because of address space limitations. Simply put, you need more bits to access the higher addresses. Moving to a 64-bit system accomplishes that, something you can do by running unofficial builds on the Pi, but the official build didn’t support it until today’s announcement of a 64-bit beta image.
This is inevitable, not purely because of this memory limitation, but because we’ve seen examples where the juggernaut of Linux development has its own eye on a 64-bit future. Official images for Raspberry Pi have always been 32-bits, and remain so for now, but the wind is beginning to blow for this and future hardware offerings that are bumping up against limitations. Along with the news of this impending architecture switch over, the official operating system has also gotten a name change: Raspbian will henceforth be known as Raspberry Pi OS.
When [Jenny List] first reported on the 8 GB rumors last June, she speculated that today’s announcement would happen on February 29th of this year. Why the leap day? It happened to be the 8th birthday of Raspberry Pi and synced up nicely with an 8 GB surprise. Today’s announcement drops the morsel of trivia that the foundation was indeed planning on that date, but missed it by three months due to supply chain disruption associated with the coronavirus pandemic that prevented them from sourcing all the parts necessary for the new power supply design included in this revision.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this move. Do you need 8 GB on your Pi, and does the 3 GB limitation of a 32-bit kernel matter to you? Let us know in the comments below.
Now building a RAID with it, is slightly less of a bad idea than before.
@ Steven said: “Now building a RAID with it, is slightly less of a bad idea than before.”
…slightly… is the key word here, it’s still a bad idea though.
Even for home use?
Just to stream media or make weekly backups?
I have an obsolete Iomega IX2-200 Nas that I need to replace, but I don’t want to use proprietary things that have support for only 5 years or so.
Raspberry Pi is my hope.
Build a RAID on a device that still requires a flaky SD card to operate?
I wish the developers would commit to supporting real solid state storage and power management instead of adding useless features like dual HDMI.
Pi 4 supports booting from USB. Or you can buy a quality SD card (e.g. the ones designed for dashcams) for devices that matter.
There is an update in the works to boot from disk. It’s not stable yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r27WcPRtpWM or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVhYvvrGhMU
I have at least a half dozen Pi, and I use exactly none of them. I won’t buy another until there’s a real storage option – M.2 or a SATA port. And I won’t even be doing that if the price is yet higher still.
I’m sorry, but even at 8 gigs, a Raspberry Pi ain’t worth $75. For me at least. But I guess it is for enough people for them to keep raising prices.
May I ask you what do you use for your development /deployment needs in the meanwhile?
Actually.. There is an option to use m.2 ssd drives. All you need is the argon m.2 case. Its for i think 30-45 dollars and will let you boot from a m.2 ssd drive. hope this helps!
Can’t they put in a software support for booting from other media, like most computers have multiple boot source options, such external drives like USB flash drive or SSD?
Do I need 8gb of RAM? Not at all, it seldom uses more than 2 when doing most of the light work I use it for. But this opens up the possibility of ramfs or tmpfs to help with SD card read/write speeds and wear. (yes, I could do that now with the 4gb option, but I need an excuse to buy the new one)
History has shown that these kinds of high RAM updates have come from Microsoft pushing to allow their Windows operating system to run on it. Happened in PDA/handhelds, happened with Netbooks, happened with PC’s shipped with Linux(forced to be sold with higher specs required by Window) and happens on many x86 SBCs. So it’s quite likely this was pushed down from Microsoft.
Psst, wanna buy an illegal 512MB DIMM?
I hope not, because that would mean Microsoft has (at least some) sway over the Raspberry Pi foundation, likely through contractual obligations. It might just be me, but I don’t want Microsoft near ANYTHING I use… at all.
Pee ‘runs ThreadX as a binary blob on the graphics processing unit (GPU)’. Guess who owns ThreadX.
Yeah the first thing you run is a Microsoft ThreadX Blob.
Too bad for you because Microsoft is one of the biggest contributors to the linux kernel that’s on your Pi already
“So it’s quite likely this was pushed down from Microsoft.”
this is the only raspberry pi that can run google chrome, so you could make the same argument about google
this is the only raspberry pi that can run big data platforms like Oracle Server so you could make the same argument about Oracle
this raspberry pi can run video games that none other can run, so you can argue that video game companies are behind it
this raspberry pi will drive new sales in new markets so you can argue that peripheral companies like anker are behind it
we can just forget that systerms like solaris and AIX have also had increasing RAM demands over the years.
or maybe we can drop the conspiracy theory shit
“this raspberry pi will drive new sales in new markets “. Why does a foundation need to do that?
To generate the money to pay for more cool charitable activities. You know, all the free educational stuff at raspberrypi.org
Because running a foundation isn’t free. Because, like you, the people that work for that foundation like to eat nice meals. Because if if they waited for you to fund their endeavors they would all turn to dust before that happened.
Why do people think that charities, foundations and non-profits run on ether……
According to the post, the change isn’t from the RPF itself, it’s from Micron making 8GB DDR4 modules they could use in their layout. The CPU can address 16GB.
Now, Windows on ARM *does* run on the RPi 3B+ and 4, but it’s neither available for general download nor is it officially supported. Microsoft had their IoT Core version running years ago. If Microsoft wanted to release an official version, there does not appear to be an issue with technical capability.
What I suspect is that it’s a business problem: Microsoft sells Windows on ARM to manufacturers to use on their devices. The RPF isn’t going to bother paying for a Windows license when they already spend resources developing and supporting the Raspbian/RPOS distributions. They didn’t even pay to license the hardware decoders built into the chipset, selling them as optional add-ons. That being the case, MS would either have to sell Windows 10 RPi Edition, or give it away for free. The former would be questionably profitable, and the latter might not fly so well in front of everyone else they’re trying to get to pay for it.
Microsoft technically gives away Windows 10 for free right now. It is freely downloadable from their website and you can run it without activating for as long as you don’t care about customizing how it looks and a few other things.
Not to mention, activating it legitimately is trivial as well. You can buy a broken Windows 7 Pro business PC off ebay for $20 and use its license key to activate your copy of Windows 10. Shady, maybe, but not illegal as you are, after all, purchasing it outright.
With that said, if you really insist on activating Windows, it’s best to buy it direct from Microsoft so it’s tied to your account and you can move it to a new PC build in the future without as much hassle.
You know what? It would be really amazing if there was a free operating system with a large software backend and I could customize its looks without buying a license. Man, that could change the world forever!
Not sure where that nonsense comes from but considering Windows has a minimum spec of 2GB and Microsoft themselves sell premium Windows hardware (Surface line) with 4GB, I’m going to call it out as a load of bullshit with a side of chips.
It’s nice for handling large point clouds, building large 3D maps and detailed indexes. Nice indexes help a lot when processing power is limited, even with low memory bandwidth.
Put your file system / on an external SSD. Only thing the SSD is used for is the boot. Snappy. I am using the Samsung T5 500GB for one of my PI4s. Thought I’d mention it.
I meant “Only SD card” is used for boot.
I don’t know about PI4, but my pi3+ is booting from USB/SSD, and skipping the SD-card entirely.
I do however have an SD-card inserted because apparently theres a weird interrupt-sdcard-related bug that consumes a fair amount of cpu, and makes the system lag and/or stall, after boot.
PI4 didn’t launch with USB boot support. Its in beta fairly recently though.
There’s a new version of the firmware out now that can boot from the USB. No SD card. It’s still being worked on, though
I can easily think of two interesting uses for 8GiB or more of RAM:
One would be cheap voxel visualisation of sections of data smaller than 2048 x 2048 x 2048 of say Computer Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Tomography or even geographic information system (GIS) data.
Another would be Traffic simulation of either data packets or motorised vehicles and predictions on the outcome of the best/worst outcome of partial faults or full crashes.
People work around not having enough RAM by storing data in formats that allow windowed access to data. Compressed video files are generally stored in formats that have an i-frame at least every 60 seconds followed by p-frame and b-frames, but if all the compressed data could all fit into memory, the lower access time could allow for higher compression ratios through the use of less i-frames. Which would could produce new file formats that either require less storage space on disk, or it could be at a higher resolution or a higher frame rate.
I just hope that the foundation do not forget its roots to much, and leave the B+ and 3(+) back on the platform.
There have been a slight increase in price, so here in Denmark the distributor price ex VAT is approx 40$ for the so called 35$ (street price, hmmmm) computer goes in the opposite direction than anything else.
Unfortunately the PineA64 1G, which spec wise is on par with the 3(+), give and take, and only costs 21$ in the US, much more expensive in Europe.
I’d say the roots are firmly in their minds at the moment – still offering the really budget end older stuff for a long time.
As for cheaper alternatives, some are good, some less so, but none of them I am aware of have anywhere near the level of support or software quality as the Pi. So you can cheap out on the board and cost yourself days making it work (of course you can learn alot of how things work in the process so its not all bad).
Which is why I always use a Pi unless I am doing something that requires or would be made much better by a features Pi’s don’t have natively.
Nah… Not buying it unless they add 3x SATA9, 10GbE SFP+, Onboard Arduino and GeForce GTX 2080 for $30 total.
To be fair, the GPU in the SoC is pretty weak and could do with a boost. The CPU has gone from single-core low-IPC 700MHz ARMv6 to quad-core, high-end 1500MHz ARMv8 (20x faster in linpack, 40x if you factor in NEON) in the time the GPU has barely even doubled the performance.
Agreed the CPU has hugely improved in comparison to the GPU. But I don’t think the GPU really needs to be beefier than it is and it started at a more respectable level in the first place. More is nice if its possible for the price of course, but the PI is a ‘credit card’ size machine with the new Pi 4 being able to drive 4K monitors plural quite well by all accounts I’ve seen. Its GPU might not have upgraded as much but its still a good improvement, and very usable. If you really NEED potent GPU you are looking in the wrong place.
“If you really NEED potent GPU you are looking in the wrong place.”
Agreed, there are several SoC boards out there with Mali GPUs, and of course the Nvidia Jetson line, if you need a beefy GPU. With that said, the news that the Foundation is working on a Vulkan driver is a boon for those of us who want to build a portable gaming machine, tablet, or micro laptop out of the newest Pi. A fully supported GPU for general purpose desktop use would mean I can ditch my aging, power hungry Core 2 Quad/FirePro Linux workstation for something modern and efficient both in space taken up and power consumed. I don’t need gamer-level graphics performance, but I would like something that can handle the occasional 3D modeling and video rendering I do on that machine, and the 4K output is nice for eventual monitor upgrades.
Still ways too weak compared to x86 embedded SBC from same price category and even weaker compared to used/refurbished desktop/server hardware.
The sub $75 x86 SBC price category is essentially non-existent. Even Odroid-H2 starts at $111 which doesn’t include RAM.
Pi 4 draws under 8 watts full load, where a refurb PC will run 75+ watts loaded. At $0.10/kWh you can save $~50/yr with the Pi 4.
Asrock Q1900 is £65 ish on ebay. I know not technically a SBC but it is small, fanless, x86 and fairly powerfull for the price point. full tilt with 1 SSD using onboard graphics she gobbled down 25w. I ran it for 4 years as a server with a pcie raid card and a load of sata drives. ITs now retired due to needing more horsepower but a very capable little board, need to find a new use for it!
You mean like Atomic PI and thousands of Intel/AMD and even VIA embedded boards from alibaba/aliexpress/taobao/JD/BG etc., I mean just look for yourself almost literally infinity seas of build embedded SBC for industrial/home automation and repurposed(refurbished) desktop/laptop/server motherboards and CPUs(for example laptop CPU with adapter for cheap refurbished desktop motherboard which is now embedded).
Aren’t RPI4 is 15 W? which is 25W with 60% efficiency PSU, also aren’t CPU worse x10-x25 in Performance/Watt then typical x86 and GPU x100-x1000 times worse, which mean for CPU computation in worse case on x86 PC you need 300w on Pi you need 3000w or 3kW + waste heat removing for typical external GPU 300W mean 30000W for RPI which is 30kW (and arond 2000 hours of computation) and we are just forgot about PSU loss and high impedance of USB.
Also if you have electricity more expensive than $0.5/kWh you better stay away from this electricity supplier seriously with wind turbine it’s like $0.03-0.3/kWh with solar $0.07-0.7/kWh + with DC you can power everything directly from your personal “HVDC” with cheap buck converter(85-99% efficiency), so you also save in waste heat removing.
Competition is heating up.
https://www.axiomtek.com/Default.aspx?MenuId=Products&FunctionId=ProductView&ItemId=25592&C=CAPA13R&upcat=270
Wow, particularly for the V1605B variant, that is a lot of capability (Passmark CPU benchmark: 6859) for very little power <15W+board and ancillaries. Small 3.5" board too, but not credit card sized – just imagine if it was!
How? That’s $500+!!
It is interesting how the Raspberry Pi is evolving. We’re now talking about a $75 computer that has no case, no power supply, no display, and no storage. Remember when it was touted as a cheap computer?
I’m certain I’ll wind up buying an 8 gig RAM model, but seriously, how big can the market be for applications that struggled with 4 Gig of ram? Are people using these as desktops and find themselves bumping up against the 4 gig limit of earlier models?
I for a while used my pi 3 as a desktop.
It “works” for casual web browsing and such.
But obviously not a power house, and its 1 GB of RAM really held it back.
I suspect that the 2-4 GB versions are a lot better as a “desktop replacement” for web browsing and lighter applications.
With 8 GB though, there is more breathing room so I at least wouldn’t say it is a bad option to have on the market.
I too have used a 3 as a desktop and found it OK but more ram really would help to a point. Also used a Pi 1 for what felt like a long time as my only PC while the workstation was being built and the replacement HDD for my laptop was arriving, that was less fun but still more usable than my very old Thinkpad.
I’m not sure the Pi really is evolving its more branching as the cheap computer end still exists almost exactly as it was, just a nice evolution of performance. There is just a new sub-species or two SBCEnthusiast and Embedded4Industry groupings with much greater performance and capabilities at a good price for what it is.
Not sure where I’d use 8 gig on a Pi… Without treating it like a full size normal PC. Which with so much ram it might well be. Having a RAMFS to lower writes to the SD card for many logging platforms might be nice – with so much ram don’t wear the SD card just store in memory till the sync. Can probably run a Pi camera at high speed for a while with the extra buffer too.. Damn the more I think about it the cooler this Pi is -its actually better than any of my laptops on paper, and even with 4gb would probably outperform the best one with its 8gb for many tasks… Wonder how good qemu/KVM virtual machine support is on arm…
The 4 GB point is where I would consider the Raspberry pi a “desktop replacement” for a lot of tasks.
In my own experience, the PI 3 is mostly held back by its lack of memory, instead of its CPU.
Of course one can always fire up something CPU intensive to make it chug, but a surprising amount of stuff isn’t all that intensive.
Have been thinking of using my PI 3 as a PC for my electronics lab, since then I could have a fairly comfortable way of looking at datasheets and such, but its lack of memory has held it back a bit. (Since as fast as one starts opening up one datasheet, one quickly finds oneself having 10+ tabs open for other components, and web calculators, etc….)
So the PI 4 has poked my interest to say the least.
And dual monitor support is interesting too, easier to be productive if one can fit more stuff in parallel. (One reason my main computer is practically a quad screen battle station….)
ah but now Microsoft can say that Windows runs on it and not just the OS but can now run applications. They have been wanting to kick Linux off the embedded platforms for over a decade. But you can’t fit an elephant into a VW Beetle.
” They have been wanting to kick Linux off the embedded platforms for over a decade. ”
yeah just like they wanted to kick Apple off the portable device market, How well has that gone for them? Does anyone even remember zune or microsoft phone anymore?
Linux is just as bad. Back in the day I ran Linux and Windows dualboot on my PC, with half the HDD for each – both ran well and I had space for games etc too. Oh yeah – it was a 4MB 486 with an 80MB disc…
Yes but that was when you were using Windows 3.11 against Linux.
So, by “linux is just as bad” you mean “finance had a version of linux that WAS just as bad”
Nobody cares
I’m sure if Microsoft ever make Windows available for ARM then you’d have a point, but right now the only version available for ARM is IoT core, and you’ve been able to run that on Raspberry Pis for many years now.
Also actual Windows only needs 2GB of RAM, so I’m not sure what you’re smoking.
They do. Windows on ARM/WinRT has been around for years now – it launched all the way back with the 1st gen Surface tablets. Right now, it’s OEM only, but some people have gotten it working on RPis. I’m kinda surprised MS hasn’t made more of a move, but it seems the problem is business related, not technical
In my experience, I found the multiple configurations to be beneficial, why buy a 4, when a 0 will do.
Or the reverse, the 2B was bogging down, so go to a 4. Heck, aren’t they still making an A+?
Yes re 3A+, and I love it. Not quite as compact as the Zero but all the processing power of the 3B+ in a compact package with no need for a bunch of adapters like the Zero (i.e. USB OTG or Mini HDMI to standard)
What do you mean applications? There’s far more use for RAM than just applications running on it. You realise Linux does a shitload of caching using up all possible RAM to make the system run *faster* right? It’s not only Chrome users who will benefit from this.
64-bit Raspbian?!? I could have used that a year or two ago.
I gave my daughter a Pi3 years ago as her first computer. I put it in a Lego case which definitely earned it some points. She loved the software that came with Raspbian and I loved the educational value of it.
But she also loved Minecraft. And the Pi version was a little too limited. I managed to install the java edition of Minecraft. That bought the Pi an extra 6 months or so but it was really underpowered.
I gave her an old Core2 PC with the Raspbian x86 port and put the x86 Minecraft on it. That was almost awesome. Except we couldn’t upgrade Minecraft to the latest version. It depends on 64-bit! I was amazed that in 2019 there was no 64-bit Raspbian!
Then I was given an i5. It was definitely time for her Core2 to go. I finally gave in, instead of Raspbian she got Kubuntu. I went through the old PC with her first and wrote down as many of Raspbian’s applications as I could find and checked with her which she used. I installed most of them on her new Kubuntu PC for her. She really loves the way KDE integrates with her Android phone (a hand-me-down from my wife, no cellular service). She also was excited to see some of the things that she had been missing when she couldn’t upgrade Minecraft. Funny though, while installing stuff I ran across Minetest. I installed that and she seems to like it more than Minecraft!
She mostly quit playing with Scratch though because it just isn’t the same without the app. That was a real bummer.
Core 2 processors are 64-bit processors. The Core Duo is a 32-bit processor
Doesn’t matter when the OS only supports 32-bit.
Except 64 bit Linux for Pi has existed for some time now.
Yes but until now not Raspbian. I think you missed the point.
At that price point with 8G and 64-bit, it actually becomes a decent choice to run a small k8s cluster on. I like the NUC’s for that use-case, but these are way cheaper.
This is exactly why I purchased 2 of them today. I’ve run k8s on the 4GB model but this has much more potential..
Told ya so!
With only one memory chip on there.
How many bits wide is the bus?
A normal DIMM slot on a motherboard is 64 bits wide.
Most DDR memory chips I know of comes in either 4, 8 or 16 bit widths.
Maybe there is 32 bit and 64 bit wide ones too. (I haven’t checked.)
But maybe it would be a semi wise idea to make a version of the board with two memory chips on it?
So that we can get a 16GB version without the more exorbitant price of a single chip with twice the capacity. (More memory per chip increases manufacturing costs and lower yield, so two 8GB chips should be cheaper than one 16 GB one. Same goes for two 4 compared to one 8. Etc…)
The board would maybe need to get a bit bigger with two chips though.
But then they could toss on an M.2 slot on it, or maybe a sata port? Since the SD card is a bit lack luster when it comes to actual storage…
I’d be surprised if the SoC has a DDR data bus wider than 32 bits. 32 bits is as wide as you’ll find in a single package, and while there’s a premium for using 32×1 instead of 16×2 it’s usually made up in board area and manufacturing costs.
I were more talking about the memory density of the chips, rather then bus width when referring to the increased price.
Squeezing in twice as much data is usually more than twice as hard.
Ie, the cost per GB goes up as the memory size of the chip goes up.
I don’t have an Pi4 8GB yet, but the LPDDR4 package on the Pi4 4GB uses a 4-die stack with 2 x 16-bit channels:
Paste this into notepad to get the callouts to align:
Micron MT53D1024M32D4DT-053 WT:D | || | | | | | | | | || | | | | | | \- Die Revision: D | || | | | | | \- Operating Temperature Grade: Wireless Temperature | || | | | | \- Speed: 1866 MHz | || | | | \- DRAM Package Code | || | | \- 4-die stack | || | \- Width: 32 bits | || \- Depth: 1024 Megabits (Capacity = Depth * Width) | | \- Voltage: 1.1V V_DD 0.6V VDDQ | \- Product Family: Mobile LPDDR4 (2x16 ch/die) \- Micron TechnologyI liked the name Raspian!
It sort of sounded like Rasputin, or rapscallion.
Now, it sounds… …so respectable, or something.
I mean the new name “Raspberry Pi OS” sounds so respectable.
Rasbian has great google-fu. Pi OS much less so. Seems like change for change’s sake to me.
It was changed because Raspbian is an independent project that’s was merely used within the Pi Foundation’s images. The 64 bit version is not using any of that project now, and the maintainer requested that the Pi Foundation choose a new name.
Ra, Ra, Raspian
Lover of the Broadcom queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra, Ra, Raspian
Upton’s greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on
with apologies to Boney M.
I caught that reference!
(which is surprising with my musical tastes!)
Let me be the first to say(write) it.
I want 64GB of RAM in my Pi 5!
Let me be the first to say (write) it.
“No one will ever need more than 64GB of RAM.” (apologies to Mr. Gates)
Last I read, the 32 bit Linux Kernel is not being supported anymore. That might be a big motivation for 64 bit Raspian
32 bit is dropped (or is soon being dropped? I forget the timeline) on x86, but it’ll be around on ARM for a while.
3GB of space per thread is barely enough … if you don’t mmap big file. But still can be used with bank switching (PAE? in kernelspace, userspace like on Gameboy MBC).
As I see it, the whole point of the raspberry pi was that it is cheap. 70 USD is not cheap.
You don’t have to buy the 8GB model. The 2GB model is still $35.
” The 2GB model is still $35.”
Except for the fact that the so called “35$ computer” produced in England cost 34£ at eg. the PiHut, also in England, which is close to 42$.
Here in Denmark the price is 36$ at RS, which is a distributor, not an ordinary shop, and 25% Vat have to be added, meaning the price lands at 45$.
It is a mockery that Broadcoms pet continues to brag about prices that are not real, or waporware products that only can be bought one at the time, so the end price including shipping is a absolutely other price.
If for instance IKEA introduced at new piece of furniture and stated that the list price was 1000 SEK, and then cashier claims 1250 SEK, it would take some 15 seconds before IKEA was in a shitstorm, because of fake pricing.
And let me state this, I do not necessarily think that the RPi is expensive (though I wonder why the price for all non 4’s keep crawling up, when all other electronics goes the other way – a new lowcost B would be appreciated), but it really annoys me that Upton keep on bragging about prices that are not true.
Also the shipping is inflated on single unit Pis that are close or equal to MRSP. Yeah, you can have the $100 shovelware* kit for $100 plus 6.99 p&p at at least double the volume and weight, or 1 of the bare board at $35 plus $14.99 p&p. Playing with shopping carts, $10 of that never seems to go away.
* crappy PSU, crappy case, crappy SD card etc etc 103 items!!! yes we did count the 4 stick on feet for the case.
Exactly, still cheap for what you are getting.
$70 is plenty cheap for a computer with these specs, do you think RAM is free? People are never gonna be satisfied.
It’s tough, for $70 I’ve got an i7 x230 and t440s, arguably more useful, and not that much more power hungry. Tough sell.
I can see this being good, but less places it’s better than an x230.
If you think it’s not much more power hungry you must have moved the decimal point when reading the spec sheet.
It’s gonna end up sucking 20W at the wall and another 20W for a screen to see it on. Meanwhile the laptop will probably cruise at 15-20W while just web browsing and only hit 60-70W total when you want to transcode a movie, which takes 24 mins in background, vs 24 hours doing nothing else on the Pi.
I’m using X230 and T430 as my daily drivers. You’re lucky to find i7 version at that price… Here in Belgium it’s still nowadays hard to find a working i5 X230 lower than 150€ (~170$).
By the way just the CPU alone on the X230 is 45W TDP (and i7 rise up on the top part of that TDP). I’m often using a 90W power adapter for my X230, as the 65W one often heats up a bit too much.
That said, if you need a cheap desktop solution, a cheap laptop (thinkpad) with 3rd or 4th Gen core i5 M CPU is a good choice (like T440p).
But for headless low power usage running 24/24 365d/y, Pi are a still a good solution. I’m using Pis for Squeezebox controller, Unifi controller, NodeRed, Mosquitto server, etc… and I would not dedicate a laptop for that.
All depends on the need and the usage.
Currently all my RPIs run headless. None of them bump up even close to the 1GB boundary when in use let alone 2, 4, or 8! My simple backup NAS way under utilizes memory for what it does. What the PI4 has going for it in my use case is the Wifi, true gigabit ethernet, and true USB 3.0 support (power and speed)… and the GPIO header of course for my electronic/robotic projects. With USB 3.0 support, I find transfer speeds very acceptable now for a home NAS. I use an external SSD (Samsung T5 500gb) for file system and system ‘feels’ snappy. Another USB 3.0 4TB spinning rust drive for storage (which now is the slowest part of any large file transfer).
I see they are finally getting boot from USB working too on the PI4 so you won’t have to use the slower SD card.
Anyway, I don’t need an 8GB model … But I’ll probably buy one once they become available over here in the states. I have at least one of each now… What’s one more :) . Like potato chips … sort of… Can’t have just one…
As for 64Bit support … NIce I suppose and is the direction (has been for some time) of computing. But for my use case of the PI series of SBCs … not really needed. I can’t think of a use case where 3GB of memory would not be enough for a ‘single’ process.
Ill wait until 128 bit oses comes out loll even car radios are getting octa cores more rom and ram …
im more excited about 64 bit raspbian than i am about having to buy the pi4 again.
@eben fricken make one with some on board flash already! micron has it CHEAP AND FAST
This might not be the whole solution for you, but there is a firmware update available that allows you to boot from USB. SD card is only needed for the initial setup, then you can run the board without SD.
Oh of course, right after I finally bought one of the 4gb models like a few days ago. This is classic -_-
Hmm 8GB…
So they want to make Chromium the default browser on Raspbian?
8 or 16 GB would be awesome. But, I run 4GB just fine using latest Ubuntu LTS release. No 32 bits for me. Haven’t used a 32 bit OS professionally or personally for a decade I bet. 64 is the future. Look forward, not back.
8 gig should make a Pi 4 quite nice for Open Media Vault, for client systems that just need files served. Why bother with transcoding on the server when the Smart TV or phone or tablet can simply read the files using DLNA?
As capable as a ESP32-WROVER-B for 3 times the price, just with a multi-tasking 64bit OS as a fat-shim instead of an thin-shim RTOS?
Just switching to a 64-bit kernel helps a lot. On my x86 where I had to keep the 32-bit user-space for other reasons, switching to a 64 bit kernel brought a BIG performance improvement. It seems that some”finding buffers” like code was using big chunks of CPU time.
In few years I will not be suprised if RPi will become a common desktop platform wiping out x86 market. There are some changes in design needed but they already have market, developers and trust so it’s not that impossible.
*smirk*
Hardly. People have been predicting the death of x86 for years. Hasn’t happened and it’s been enshrined even more in gaming consoles.
Yup, Pi is a head to head competitor with x86, as long as you have your performance expectations stuck in 2005.
Unless/until they stick one of these on it.. https://insidehpc.com/2020/03/video-overview-of-the-fujitsu-a64fx-processor/
I don’t believe RPis will wipe out a large swath of any computing sector, but the technology (low power ARM chips) has certainly already had the effect you’ve described. Many people are buying only phones and tablets now, not bothering with either desktop computers or laptops.
Particularly noticeable if you bought a well performing machine at “peak laptop” a few years ago, and have realised that it will cost you double now to get anything worth replacing it with. The economy of scale unravelled. However, recent events have all the cheaper units sold out everywhere, so maybe there’s a bit of a revival in home laptop sales, but don’t know how long it will last, whether people will upgrade when they’ve got the cash, whether they’ll go back to the office and forget about the home machine indefinitely, or whether they will “maintain” home computing capability for years “just in case”
There were a few use cases where the ram was the limiting factor, like running a Zoneminder server. An official 64 bit OS is welcome, too. Looks like all upsides to me.
Just curious, how many cams does it take to run into problems on 4GB with Zoneminder?
It depends on how many frames you want to capture in the lead-up to an event. I don’t have the answer off the top of my head, but I know the ZM guys complained about ram exhaustion when they working on making it work on the Pi.
Ah right. Yes and resolution too I guess. Thanks for response.
I tried it once. I had plenty of RAM, but ran out of processor at about 4 HD streams at 10 fps. As always, YMMV.
What’s missing for me, is a good SSD solution. Ram, meh. SSD rather than SD – win. And some actual raspberries in the box (probably freeze dried).
Please fix the YouTube playback performance issues, Elon. Fitting-out a 4GB RPi4 with an SSD, loading all the available software, and then finding the video playback no better than a Pi3, was a damned disappointment. All those plied reviewers that politely overlooked the issue, will burn for their misdeeds at our expense.
Perhaps the average performance requirements have also changed. In 2005, little was done on mobile devices. A lot of games have shifted to mobile and ever some traditional productivity. Classic entertainment media has all but shifted entirely to mobile or smart-TV solutions.
So unless you are a serious PC gamer, there is little need for a desktop more powerful than a core (2) duo. For people that do want a intermediary productivity device, the PI4 pretty much hits the sweet spot.
Personally, yes.
This is my general purpose workhorse. Oh? New data processing? Raspberry Pi. NAS? Raspberry Pi. Lab work? Probably a Raspberry Pi.
Having 8GB of RAM will help any of the tasks I do, and could expand that list of tasks, too. You might maybe be able to run a minecraft server now, or even maayybe play real video finally!
I’m excited of the prospects of an 8GB Raspberry Pi, and for $75, that’s a steal!
I have a RPI4 with 4GB of ram running:
– influx DB
– node red
– mosquitto
– rtl_433 for sdr
– grafana
– portainer.io
– pihole
– pivpn
each one in a container using very little CPu and with a SD of only 32GB collecting data on the DB every 6 sec since the rpi4 came out. I can graph data of the last 6 months averaged in about 10 secs….
of course it is headless, no KDM or gnome, just ssh and web interface to all the applications, each one with its own web server listening….
I am happy and I am thinking of running off-line ML with tensorflow on all my IP cameras which record a stream only if there is a movement and sending an alarm if just a person is recognised.
It is a bit hard to install everything, but interesting, you learn a lot and at least I am getting fun.
if you are looking to run WIN10 this is the wrong device…. ;) I hope I gave you some inspiration.