The Raspberry Pi Foundation is now releasing a new version of its Raspberry Pi 4 minicomputer, which is equipped with 8GB RAM.
It’s been about a year since the Raspberry Pi 4 was introduced, and it has so far been sold with RAM memory configurations 2GB and 4GB. Initially, a model with 1GB RAM was also released, but this has now been taken out of Raspberry Pi’s range. According to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, many users have requested a version of the computer with a little more RAM, and hopefully, these can be satisfied by the 8GB variant.
Previously, the release of such a modification was simply impossible, since there were no 8 GB LPDDR4 chips suitable for the Raspberry Pi 4 on the market. Now they are, and we got a new version of a single-board PC.
To equip the Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 GB of memory, the foundation has selected Micron chips, capable of meeting the board’s requirements. Potentially the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC can address up to 16 GB of LPDDR4, so we could see more news in the future.
The new variant of the Pi 4 could be of great use to those who use it for “server” workloads or as the main desktop PC. This is because the foundation has also announced the availability of the official operating system, Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian), both in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The latter one allows you to map all 8GB into the address space of a single process.
At the moment, the Raspberry Pi Foundation recommends that all users use the 32-bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS or use 64-bit systems such as Ubuntu and Gentoo, as the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS is still in development. So far, it is only offered as an early beta version.
There are no more changes in hardware except the memory increase. A single-board computer carries Wi-Fi 802.11ac (2.4 and 5 GHz) and Bluetooth 5.0 / BLE wireless adapters, as well as a Gigabit Ethernet network controller with an appropriate cable connector. Two micro-HDMI interfaces are available for connecting 4K displays. In addition, there are two USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, as well as a symmetrical USB Type-C port for power supply. To store the operating system and data is a micro-SD card.
Also, the Raspberry Pi 4 was not cheap. The price of the 2GB variant is now reduced from $45 to $35. A 4 GB upgrade costs $55. And the new version is available at $75.
