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Hardware Technology

Raspberry Pi 4 Featuring Faster CPU, Up To 4GB of RAM Launched (raspberrypi.org) 195

Raspberry Pi today introduced a new version of its popular line of single-board computer. The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is the fastest Raspberry Pi ever, with the company promising "desktop performance comparable to entry-level x86 PC systems." The specifications are: A 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU (~3x performance); 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM; full-throughput Gigabit; Ethernet; dual-band 802.11ac wireless networking; Bluetooth 5.0; two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports; dual monitor support, at resolutions up to 4K; VideoCore VI graphics, supporting OpenGL ES 3.x; 4Kp60 hardware decode of HEVC video; and complete compatibility with earlier Raspberry Pi products. It starts at $35.
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Raspberry Pi 4 Featuring Faster CPU, Up To 4GB of RAM Launched

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  • Faster! (Score:5, Funny)

    by null etc. ( 524767 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @09:06AM (#58813352)

    I just bought one of these, and it's so fast, it let me write First Post!

  • The official USB type-C power supply [raspberrypi.org] delivers 15.3W. Do you have any number of actual idle and active power consumption?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Voltage is 5V. Intensity is 3 amps. That's 15 watts maximum power or nominal power.

        But all computers consume lower power when load is idle or average. This is what determines how much you actually consume and pay in the bill. That was my question.

        • s/Intensity/Current

          Those little switching 5V power supplies have a very poor power factor (ratio of real power to apparent power). You're probably paying for 2x-3x the power. (0.5 to 0.33). If you can find something that stats 95% efficiency they might be referring to a power factor of 0.95, this is very good.

          Less than 0.5 might sound terrible but some LED night lights are 0.33 to 0.12 so you pay about 3x-8x. That 0.5W LED night light is likely costing you as much as a 4W incandescent. Cheap LEDs may seem t

          • by DamonHD ( 794830 ) <d@hd.org> on Monday June 24, 2019 @12:17PM (#58814588) Homepage

            1) In the EU (to pass CE) I think that the pf has to be very close to 1 by law.

            2) Again, I'd be amazed if any significant fraction of (EU) domestic users pay for anything other than real power, so pf is irrelevant to them.

            But tell me why I'm wrong...

            Rgds

            Damon

            • 1) In the EU (to pass CE) I think that the pf has to be very close to 1 by law.

              No, as of 2013 EU reg there is no minimum for lamps less than 2W. And for 2W to 5W the minimum is a 0.4 power factor. (see Table 5, Annex III of 1194/2012)

              I don't know why you assumed pf has to be close to 1. The EU tries to improve things with regulation, not make stupid or impossible demands. Even at the most strictest top end of power draw, it's only requiring a 90% efficiency. Which is decent but usually easily to exceed in a well designed device.

              • by DamonHD ( 794830 )

                OK, I'll check up on that, thanks. 0.9 is quite decent given that as you say an uncorrected device can be ~0.3, which caused a friend of mine some head-scratching:

                http://www.earth.org.uk/note-o... [earth.org.uk]

                But still point (2) still stands: are domestic customers charged for anything other than real power?

                Rgds

                Damon

                • But still point (2) still stands: are domestic customers charged for anything other than real power?

                  A residential meter will read the real power. You pay for your neighbors' apparent power through "distribution" charges. The power company never eats the cost of these things. Industrial power gets billed for any power factor below 1.0. So no, I'll retract my earlier statement you likely don't pay more if you run a bunch of lower pf stuff. As least not directly.

                  The whole real versus apparent power thing has been an issue for a very long time. It's why large reactive (Q) loads like big industrial motors have

                  • by DamonHD ( 794830 )

                    Yep, industrial is very different.

                    Anyhow, thanks for the reminder on low-power lighting.

                    Damon

          • by Anonymous Coward

            From https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/product-briefs/USB-C-Product-Brief.pdf

            Efficiency:
            81% minimum (output current from 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%)
            72% minimum at 10% load

        • by azba ( 1432029 )
          It is more 0.5 amps than the model 3. It means more power available for the attached USB devices.
        • by kenh ( 9056 )

          The idle, or average power consumption is 7.65 watts, plus or minus 7.65 watts.

    • by SolarAxix ( 457087 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @09:49AM (#58813566)

      The team that runs the www.raspberrypi.org (now running on a cluster of Pi 4 in one of their two data centers) mentioned that idle is now 3W and peak is around 7W:

      "The Raspberry Pi 4 is out. It’s a quad core ARM A72 running at 1.5Ghz with 4GB of RAM and native 1Gbps ethernet. This means that according to our benchmarks (PHP 7.3 and WordPress) it’s about 2.5x the speed of the 3B+, thanks to the much faster core design and slight clock speed boost. The downside is that it uses more power. Idle power consumption is up slightly to about 3W, peak is now around 7W, up from 5W. It has some improved video features too and USB3."

      Source: https://blog.mythic-beasts.com... [mythic-beasts.com]

      While they don't mention it, I don't think it would include the total power consumption if you have additional USB devices attached to it which could drive it to 15W (5v and 3 amps for a total of 15W).

    • German c't magazine measured [heise.de] 4.4 W idle, but with USB keyboard, USB mouse and Gigabit Ethernet connected; 4.2 W with WiFi instead of GE, and 7.6 W under full load.

  • finally some RAM (Score:5, Informative)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday June 24, 2019 @09:13AM (#58813394) Homepage Journal

    The addition of more RAM was critical for many projects. About time. Too bad they didn't do it sooner, I could have avoided buying pine64.

    Their video core is not the only publicly documented core though, that's a lie. It's not even fully documented! You still need a blob! Mali, on the other hand, has a fully OSS driver. There is also an OSS Tegra driver.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I hope they document the (Broadcom?) SoC being used. Previous Pi's only have partial documentation and it's riddled with errors. Guess you get what you pay for. For 3x the price you can get a Beaglebone Blue and easily find the Texas Instruments SoC document in all its 6000 pages of glory.

        Trust me, the Broadcom official documentation is just as terrible. Broadcom sees themselves as an turnkey ASIC provider - they have a chip for your need, and here's the software that goes with it. If you're lucky, you'll

      • For 3x the price you can get a Beaglebone Blue

        That right there is the problem. raspi is nigh-unbeatable as a value proposition. $40 for board and case (I'll come up with my own satisfactory power supply, thanks) is a fantastic deal for that much hardware, and even with 4GB it remains very reasonably priced. Or the zero [w] for those super-low-cost projects. If they can get rid of the last blobs, it'll be difficult to fault them on any level.

    • by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @11:04AM (#58814060) Homepage

      The addition of more RAM was critical for many projects. About time. Too bad they didn't do it sooner,

      They wouldn't have been able to:
      the previous SoCs only expose enough address lanes to access 1GiB max.

      That SoC on the RPi4 is the first one to expose enough address lanes to be physically wired to 2GiB or 4GiB ram.

      Their video core is not the only publicly documented core though, that's a lie. It's not even fully documented! You still need a blob! Mali, on the other hand, has a fully OSS driver.

      Actually, nope. If you've been following Phoronix, you'd be noticing that Eric Anholt has been writing V3D [github.io].
      According to the RPi Foundation blog post, they now consider this stack mature enough and will be using THAT instead of the blob for 3D on the RPi4.
      So Video core is joining the likes of Lima, Panfrost, Freedreno and other such opensource reverse engineered drivers.

      Also, in related news, AMD is in the process of licensing (again, if you count that time they sold Adreno to Qualcomm, back when it was still ATI) current Radeon cores to ARM chip makers (Samsung if memory serves correctly), so we could finally have an embed ARM SoC with a GPU whose driver is actually financed by the core's designing company (AMD has paid kernel driver developpers)

      There is also an OSS Tegra driver.

      ...too bad that Nvidia isn't giving as much ressources for OSS *workstation GPU* drivers.

      • ...too bad that Nvidia isn't giving as much ressources for OSS *workstation GPU* drivers.

        My understanding from discussions on this subject way back in the days of the Xbox and NV2* is that doing the deal to get their GPU in there required them to get into some NDA-in-perpetua with Microsoft that prevents them from simply releasing GEforce documentation, but Tegra is not similarly encumbered. Maybe someday we'll have desktop GPUs based on Tegra and not GEforce, whatever the hell that would actually mean, and then they can give us the full sources.

  • The ARM processor used in the Raspberry Pi does not have the vulnerabilities of the Intel processors. Would it make sense to use Raspberry Pi computers as the only way a network connects to the Internet?
    • by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @09:36AM (#58813492) Homepage
      Raspberry Pi on Raspberry Pi June 22nd, 2019 by pete [mythic-beasts.com]

      "Question: Is the Raspberry Pi 4 any good?
      "Answer: It's good enough to run its own launch website with tens of millions of visitors."
    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      With full browser support.
      Midori? Firefox?
      Play mp4 in the browser?
      Buy a used Intel laptop, put Linux on it and enjoy Midori.
    • by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @09:53AM (#58813594) Homepage
      Benchmarking Machine Learning on the New Raspberry Pi 4, Model B [hackster.io]

      "How much faster is the new Raspberry Pi? It's a lot faster."
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by MegaThawt ( 672826 )

      The ARM Cortex-A72 processor was vulnerable to Cache Timing Side-Channel exploitations such as Spectre.
      ( see https://developer.arm.com/supp... [arm.com] )

      The Rasberry PI 3 Model B uses the Cortex A53 in-order chips which are not affected because they lack the speculative execution required for this vulnerability.

      However, any device is going to bring it's own potential vulnerabilities:

      "A report published this week by the NASA Office of Inspector General reveals that in April 2018 hackers breached the agency's network

    • The ARM processor used in the Raspberry Pi does not have the vulnerabilities of the Intel processors. Would it make sense to use Raspberry Pi computers as the only way a network connects to the Internet?

      Per TFA [raspberrypi.org], they went from Cortex-A7 which was immune to both MELTDOWN and Spectre to Cortex-A53 which was also immune to both, and now with this latest board on to Cortex-A72, which is an OoO core which is vulnerable to Spectre [wikipedia.org]! I am tempted to presume that there is some sort of mitigation patching done, but you know the old saying... "Trust, but verify."

      If your primary concern is security, this new raspi is potentially less secure than the last one.

      • One idea is to arrange a network so that Internet connections are available only to a browser running on a Raspberry Pi. Saving a web page would require saving it across the network. Moving it across the network would require that it go through a computer running anti-malware.

        Would that minimize the chances of successful attacks on a network?
        • by fintux ( 798480 )

          If you'll have RPi 4, then you'll have both Meltdown and Spectre. If you have an older version, then you won't have those.

          Like you seem to be understanding, just routing the data through the RPi is not helping at all (it's the opposite, you're adding one more device with different security vulnerabilities). You can of course do some more advanced things, like firewall and pi-hole, that will reduce at least some of the risks, but even this will not prevent the Meltdown, Spectre and Zombieload kind of vulnera

  • by Nukenbar ( 215420 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @09:30AM (#58813470)

    Not using a full size HDMI connector just added another dongle for most people and makes it less accessible.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Just get a Micro HDMI to HDMI cable.

      https://smile.amazon.com/Amazo... [amazon.com]

    • Fortunately, at least, they're not charging Apple "highway robbery" prices for the dongles and cables.
      • by jimbo ( 1370 )

        I just bought a lightening adapter from apple.com for $10. Other adapters are very expensive but my point is; it depends...

        In any case; why involve Apple in this thread? If you spend every chance brooding about a particular company instead of just putting them out of your mind maybe you're wasting energy.

      • Sure, their adapters are not hundreds of dollars, but they do add up to well over the price of the device. Even ignoring speakers, monitors, mice, and keyboards, the $35 price has always been pretty misleading when you have to spend like $50 on power cables and other necessities to even get it to boot.

    • This is a huge deal. The mini connector is jut not stable. I have one of these mini PCs with that connector, and it just does not get a stable connection, and it always looks like it is going to get ripped off.

    • Not using a full size HDMI connector just added another dongle for most people and makes it less accessible.

      They could just buy a £4 ($5) micro HDMI cable [amazon.co.uk].

  • my old dual core atom server just died,

    Apache, ssh, calibre server and some security web cams were all I was doing with it.

    • by hjf ( 703092 )

      Yeah because the USB storage performance won't be a bottleneck...

      • Yeah because the USB storage performance won't be a bottleneck...

        It may not, RPi based servers often use NAS. And with the upgraded ethernet its more practical.

      • Yeah because the USB storage performance won't be a bottleneck...

        USB3 is plenty for most people. And this raspi finally has non-garbage USB, allegedly.

  • It would be ok for a small lampp server that doesn't have to do much (little traffic). Maybe use modbus over tcp/ip to monitor some devices and record the data into a database.
    • by DamonHD ( 794830 )

      My current RPi2 is serving several sites, other primary services such as DNS, and is indeed also doing some monitoring over MODBUS.

      http://www.earth.org.uk/note-o... [earth.org.uk]

      I'm just embarking on an upgrade to RP3(B+) mainly to give me easy access to newer OS images that support HTTPS in Apache.

      I think that I'm going to hold fire on the 4 since the idle consumption is creeping up (the 4 is around 3W idle it seems; I'm on 1W with the 2 and the planned upgrade to the 3 will already take me to 2W) above what I'm comfort

  • I like the hardware video codec! This looks like the first Pi that can easily handle HD.
  • by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @10:49AM (#58813960) Journal

    ...better connectivity with NASA systems, curiously.

  • Got Plex running over a year ago, learned about Pi-hole over the weekend. Reading up on Pi-hole I've got concerns that it may not play nice with Plex.

    Anyone got both running on the same Pi?
    • Plex has never played good with anything else. And ELEC has way way better decoding on the PI. Even though Plex uses your plex server to decode the videos, it still does not work with high res vids for some reason (at least it did not when I uninstalled it a few months ago).

  • ... seems like a good argument in favor of limiting users to a certain (read: low) number of Anonymous Coward posts per time period (5-10/month) or enforcing a long time period before you can post anonymously again (24 or 48 hours between anonymous posts). If I could filter out the Anonymous Cowards, there'd be barely anything left to the comments section today.

  • It now needs a powerbrick?

    • by Trongy ( 64652 )

      The official power supply is still a wall-wart. The stated power requirement has gone up from 2.5A to 3A.

  • Do you still need a funky binary blob just to get the thing to boot?
    And if people are trying to build open graphics drivers (for both the ARM side and the side running on the VideoCore stuff) then why has no-one tried to replace the boot blob?

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