The Raspberry Pi foundation has released its Raspberry Pi 4, with more memory. The 8GB version is available at shops for around 75 USD / 85 euros and complements the earlier models with 2GB and 4GB.
Raspberry Pi 4 is almost a year old with nearly 3 million units shipped and a couple of minor board revisions + reduced the price of the 2GB variant from $45 to $35. On the software side, we’ve done enormous amounts of work to reduce the idle and loaded power consumption of the device, passed OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance, started work on a Vulkan driver, and shipped PXE network boot mode and a prototype of USB mass storage boot mode – all this alongside the usual round of bug fixes, feature additions, and kernel version bumps.
While we launched with 1GB, 2GB and 4GB variants, even at that point we had our eye on the possibility of an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4. We were so enthusiastic about the idea that the non-existent product made its way into both the Beginner’s Guide and the compliance leaflet.
The BCM2711 chip that we use on Raspberry Pi 4 can address up to 16GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM, so the real barrier to our offering a larger-memory variant was the lack of an 8GB LPDDR4 package. These didn’t exist (at least in a form that we could address) in 2019, but happily our partners at Micron stepped up earlier this year with a suitable part. And so, today, we’re delighted to announce the immediate availability of the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4, priced at just $75.It’s worth reflecting for a moment on what a vast quantity of memory 8GB really is. To put it in retro-perspective (retrospective?), this is a BBC Micro‘s worth of memory for every bit in the memory of the BBC Micro; it’s a little over 13,000 times the 640KB that Bill Gates supposedly thought should be enough for anyone (sadly, it looks as though this quote is apocryphal).
If you’re a power user, intending to compile and link large pieces of software or run heavy server workloads, or you simply want to be able to have even more browser tabs open at once, this is definitely the Raspberry Pi for you.
What else has changed?
To supply the slightly higher peak currents required by the new memory package, James has shuffled the power supply components on the board, removing a switch-mode power supply from the right-hand side of the board next to the USB 2.0 sockets and adding a new switcher next to the USB-C power connnector. While this was a necessary change, it ended up costing us a three-month slip, as COVID-19 disrupted the supply of inductors from the Far East.
New 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 now available for $75
