Raspberry Pi 4 with Cortex A72 quadcore, USB 3.0 and up to 4GB ram appears

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced the Raspberry Pi 4. According to the makers, the computer board is three times as powerful as its predecessor, and includes USB 3.0, WiFi-ac and Gigabit Ethernet. Versions with 1GB, 2GB and 4GB ram will appear.

The makers have improved a lot with the Raspberry Pi 4 compared to the previous mini computers. The Raspberry Pi foundation now claims to be able to offer even PC-like performance, while preserving the hackability of the computing board.

The CPU is Broadcom’s BCM2711. The Pi has thus been upgraded to a 64-bit quad-core with Cortex A72 cores with a clock speed of 1.5 GHz. Compared to the Cortex A53 quadcore at 1.4GHz of the Raspberry Pi 3 B+, ​​the performance would have tripled.

The new addition to the Raspberry Pi family also has dual-band WiFi-ac and Bluetooth 5.0, and can decode H.265 video. There are two USB 3.0 ports, in addition to two USB 2.0 ports. A new feature is that the computer can control two monitors. In addition, there is hardware acceleration of 4k display at 60 fps. The VideoCore VI GPU supports OpenGL ES 3.

The layout of the board and the dimensions have remained the same as much as possible. The power is now via USB-C, and the single HDMI connector of the Pi B+ has been replaced by two micro HDMI interfaces. The Ethernet interface is a full-through gigabit instance that now sits on the opposite side of the board from before. The four-pin power-over-ethernet interface is still in the same place as the B+, for compatibility with the PoE Hat accessory.

There will be three versions of the Raspberry Pi 4. The version with 1GB ram costs 39.95 euros, the one with 2GB ram 49.95 euros and the one with 4GB 59.95 euros. The Pi 4 is not a replacement for existing boards; they also remain for sale.

Along with the new computer, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is releasing an update to the Raspbian software. It is based on the upcoming Debian 10 Buster software and includes a modified interface and the Chromium 74 browser.