Ok, it’s officially time to stop referring to the Raspberry Pi as the ‘low-powered’ hobbyist motherboard. Because now there’s a new version of the Raspberry Pi 4 with a whopping 8GB of RAM.
That’s as much RAM as in the Mac I’m typing this on and twice as much as the iPhone you might be reading it on. The new edition, which is on sale today for $75, doubles the existing top spec of 4GB of RAM.
In a blog post this week, the company revealed it had initially let slip plans for an 8GB model in the original Beginner’s Guide and compliance leaflet, but some technical restrictions prevented it happening until now.
Raspberry Pi Trading CEO Eben Upton wrote: “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.”
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Upton points out that its 13,000 times more memory than the 640KB from Bill Gates’ purported famous quote about the launch of the 1981 IBM computer. “640K ought to be enough for anybody,” Gates reputedly said, but the main man at Microsoft denies it. The old Commodore 64 only had 64KB of RAM, so 640KB was considered to be a fair bit of memory at the time, to be fair.
The doubling of available RAM isn’t the only change to the Raspberry Pi 4 model. The power supply component have been shuffled to include a switch next to the USB-C power connector. This is to ensure the higher peak currents from the new memory package can be supported.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
