In a surprising move, the Raspberry Pi foundation announced the much-anticipated Raspberry Pi 4. See why it matters.
Wow! The Raspberry Pi Foundation just announced the Raspberry Pi with awesome additions. With the new hardware, the desktop experience should be even smoother. Plus, it includes support for optionally more memory, 4k displays, USB-C, gigabit ethernet, Raspbian updates and more, much more.
UPDATE: The Raspberry Pi foundation just announced a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM! Read more here.
What's New
In summary, this is what stands out in this release:- Updated ARM Cpu. Now 1.5GHz Arm
- Updated Ram size (1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB)
- Two new USB 3 ports
- 4-bit BCM2711 quad-core A72 CPU @ 1.5GHz
- VideoCore VI GPU
- Gigabit Ethernet port
- Support for 4k displays
- Dual-band WiFi supporting both 2.4GHz and 5GHz
- Double-HDMI - so now you can connect two monitors
- Powered by a USB Type C
- Bluetooth 5.0
- Audio – 4-pole stereo audio and composite video port
Why the Raspberry Pi is matters
Before going forward, let's review why the Pi is important.- it runs Linux
- it's super cheap
- it's an excellent computer for kids
- it's excellent for teaching computing kids
- it's an excellent alternative to the Chrome OS
- it can be a VPN server
- it can be a gaming machine
- it can be used for robotics
- it can interface with Arduino trough its GPIO header
- it's an excellent opportunity to learn Linux
- And so much more!
Physical Computing
The PI allows us to interface with the external world (called physical computing) with its GPIO header. It's basically a standard 40 pin I/O that you can use to read/send electric signals to LEDs, motors, sensors, etc. With it we can build all sorts of things including robots.
It's perfect for kids
Either being their first PC (as in personal computer, not as in Windows) or an upgrade, I think that Pi's are perfect for kids.
Why? We could for example teach them:
- basics of computing with MIT's Scratch language
- linux - so they grow up used to the best OS in the world
- python programming
- game development using python and pydev
- arts and image manipulation with GIMP
It's can be a gaming console
Yes, you could install Retropie on it and load your ROMs into it. Just plug some controllers and you're ready to go.
It can be a hub to learn computing
This is one my favourites. One could use the Pi to learn Python, programming, game development, physical computing and so much more. The Pi is also an excellent introduction to free/open source software and to Linux in general.It can be a Media Center
Speaking of sharing, you could use the Pi as your media center using Kodi for example.. So all your videos could be shared between devices connected on the same network.
It's could be for a personal VPN
The Pi has a very low power consumption which makes it a great always-on VPN server. Trough it you'll get secure access to your home network when you're on the go and can use it for secure web browsing when you're on public networks.It could be a personal File server
You could turn your Pi into a file server to back up and share content from anywhere on your local network. That way, you could share with everyone connected to your home network access all your files potentially hosted on that old external drive.It could be a Web Server
Yes! If you don't believe, check this article out on how the Raspberri Pi foundation built its website running on a cluster of Pi's handling record load. Very interesting read.It runs Linux
This Raspberry Pi 4's operating system, Raspbian was updated from a major Debian release, Buster. Buster brings a few user interface tweaks and a whole host of software upgrades, including Python 3.7.
It could replace your old computer
Yes! We've been waiting for nice ARM computers for some time now. Turns out that the Pi 4 has enough specs to be considered as an entry-level computer. The Pi 4 also supports dual monitors and comes with USB 3.0 interface collaborating with faster external storage access.
Pricing and availability
This is the best part. The pricing for just the Raspberry Pi 4 board starts from $35 and depending on the choice of RAM (1-4 GB) as detailed below:- Raspberry Pi 4 with 1 GB RAM: $35 USD
- Raspberry Pi 4 with 2 GB RAM: $
4535 USD - Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB RAM: $55 USD
- Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB RAM: $75 USD (New!) - Read the official announcement
Performance
By the specs, it's clear that the Pi 4 is way better than the previous generations. But how much? This beautiful post from Gareth Halfacree provides a lot of details on it. Allow me to show what stood out to me: |
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The official announcement
The announcement video from the Pi Foundation summarizing some of the changes can be seen belowFinal Thoughts
The Pi has always amazed me. Being a fan of physical computing and having both a Pi and an Arduino, I'm so excited to see the recent improvements with the Pi that I'm planning to by one for my kids and one for me to test out different use cases. Plus, we the excellent performance, the Pi now not only serves as a small server but as a very capable GNU/Linux desktop system.And you, have you considered the Pi yet?
References
- The Raspberry Pi Foundation
- Retropie
- The Scratch Programming Language
- Raspbian
- An introduction to Raspberry Pi GPIO
- Low-cost Raspberry Pi 4 cluster handles record web traffic for Pi 4 launch
- Could a Raspberry Pi be your next desktop PC?
- Benchmarking a Pi 4
- Introducing Raspberry Pi Imager
- 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75
See Also
- My journey to 1 million articles read
- Why I use Fedora
- Why use CentOS
- How to create a CentOS Stream VM on Hyper-V
- How I fell in love with i3
- Windows Subsystem for Linux, the best way to learn Linux on Windows
- Creating a Ubuntu Desktop instance on Azure
- Copying data between Azure databases in 3 easy steps
- Building and Running ASP.NET Core apps on Linux
- Why use CentOS
- How to create a CentOS Stream VM on Hyper-V
- How to create a CentOS VM on Azure