- An increased memory capacity makes the board ideal for enhanced processing of data-intensive applications
- Retains all the essential features of the already available Raspberry Pi 4 boards
Simply within a year since its launch, the Raspberry Pi 4 witnessed a huge jump in sales, thanks to the many enhancements it underwent such as reduced idle and loaded power consumption, availability of OpenGL ES 3.1, soon-to-be-introduced Vulkan driver and prototype of USB mass storage boot mode.
With powerful 1GB, 2GB and 4GB variants, electronics enthusiasts had wide options in front of them that fitted their budget. At the same time, there was growing anticipation for the future release of an 8GB version. So, after a wait of 12 months and even more technical enhancements, the Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB LPDDR4 memory is now finally available.
A perfect balance of processing and storage makes the new 8GB board ideal for processing large amounts of data with minimal latency, including edge gateways, machine vision and facial recognition. And not just that. Web browsing, ultra-HD video streaming, online gaming and image processing are all possible. Desktop computer users, electronics hobbyists and professional developers will find the newly available option highly-attractive and suited to their computing needs.
Key features
- BCM2711 system-on-chip delivers increased energy efficiency as compared to previous models.
- A quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 64-bit processor clocked at 1.5GHz enables the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B to run up to 3x faster than its predecessors.
- Two micro HDMI ports for supporting dual-display output at 4K resolutions.
- Connectivity: Two SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports for rapid data transfer to mass-storage devices (up to 5 Gbps); True Gigabit Ethernet connectivity delivering network data rates of up to 1Gbps; Dual-band wireless networking at 2.4GHz and 5GHz, delivering real-world data rates over 100 Mbps.
Other than the above, the new 8GB board has all the same specifications of the already available Raspberry Pi 4 boards.
- H.265 decode (4kp60), H.264 decode (1080p60) and H.264 encode (1080p30); OpenGL ES 3.1 graphics; hardware image sensor pipeline.
- User-definable GPIO on standard 40-pin header with full backward compatibility and additional multiplexed UART, I2C and SPI peripherals.
- Micro SD card slot for loading operating system and data storage.
- Power over Ethernet (PoE) support using a separate HAT accessory.
No wonder that such specifications make the board match the heavy processing capabilities of present-day computers.
“This is a product that we’ve been looking forward to releasing since the launch of Raspberry Pi 4 in June 2019 and now, it has finally become a reality. This product and our forthcoming 64-bit Debian-based operating system will open up a wide range of new high-end applications for the Raspberry Pi platform,” said Eben Upton, founder and chief executive, Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The board is priced at US$ 75.
