Raspberry Pi 4 model B
Announced on 24th June 2019, the Raspberry Pi 4 is a new Pi design, with ethernet + USB ports swapping positions from previous models. In addition, the 4 has three variants, only differing in amount of RAM: 1/2/4GB models, selling for $35/45/55.
This version upgraded from USB micro-B to a more powerful USB-C connector for charging. This delivers an extra 500mA of current, ensuring a full 1.2A for connected devices, even during demanding tasks.
Also, the type-A (full-size) HDMI connector is abandoned in favor of dual micro-HDMI ports, allowing for two external displays while maintaining a compact design.
The new version of the 4B with the same board but supporting 8GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM was announced on 28th May 2020.
The BCM2711 chip use on Raspberry Pi 4 can address up to 16GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM.
Operating System
Pi 4 required Debian Buster which was a pre-release version of the operating system (full release July 6th 2019).
Model 4A
Unlike the popular Model 1A+ and 3A+, there is no Raspberry Pi 4 A. According to the foundation, they haven’t found the right set of features to create a price difference for a potential Model 4A at this time.
Raspberry Pi Website
The Raspberry Pi 4 is good enough to run its own launch website with tens of millions of visitors, like the official Raspberry website itself.
14 Pi 4s was setup for PHP processing for the main website (56 cores, 56GB RAM), two for static file serving (8 cores, 8GB RAM) and two for memcached (8 cores / 8GB RAM) even if the front-end load balancers, download and apt servers are still on non-Pi hardware, split across three data centres (two in London, one in Amsterdam).
Every page from the blog after Saturday 22nd June has been generated on a Raspberry Pi 4.
Specifications
Raspberry Pi 4 is built around BCM2711, a complete re-implementation of BCM283X on 28nm.
- Broadcom BCM2711, Quad core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.8GHz
- 1GB, 2GB, 4GB or 8GB LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM (depending on model)
- 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz IEEE 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 5.0, BLE
- Gigabit Ethernet
- 2 USB 3.0 ports; 2 USB 2.0 ports.
- Raspberry Pi standard 40 pin GPIO header (fully backwards compatible with previous boards)
- 2 × micro-HDMI® ports (up to 4kp60 supported)
- 2-lane MIPI DSI display port
- 2-lane MIPI CSI camera port
- 4-pole stereo audio and composite video port
- H.265 (4kp60 decode), H264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode)
- OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.0
