Designing the Raspberry Pi 4, Together !

A Whole New Fabrication Process :

In the recent press releases and talks, RasFO. & Eben Upton have said that they have reached the pinnacle of performance on 40 Nanometre silicon board, With the addition of Wifi and BT, There is no space available on the board for anything new. But it should not be the end of RPi. Technology has made is possible for us to work on Silicon boards as small as 10 NanoMetre.
While its not planned, A New fabrication process, Ideally 22-28nM, Should open up a lot of new ways of upgrade for our beloved Pi. Changing this will cost RasFo and increase the price per unit, But I don’t think ~50MSRP is worth thinking twice for RPi4.

- Did You Know-

Better Processor for Pi4 :

Raspberry Pi 3 included a Broadcom BCM2837 Processor on it,With ARM Cortex-A53 CPU, 64-bit Architecture, 1.2Ghz of speed and 4 Cores. While ARMv7 Dominated the single-board computers scene during 2015-17, It’s too underpowered for today;
For the next-gen Raspberry Pi 4, We say 64-bit ARMv8 boards based on Cortex-A55 and Cortex-A72 are a future-proof choice. An update in CPU department would mean a more snappier RaspberryPi. Newer A72 boards are also optimized for using 50% less power and can be paired with the Cortex-A53 processor in big.LITTLE configuration.

4k-Capable Graphics Unit :

The older Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU does not support 4k Video (or even HVEC 1080p), Neither did it helped much with NLP. To fulfill the demands of future, A high-end GPU is required, Such as Mali-G72. Arm Mali-G72 is the second generation Bifrost-based GPU for High Performance products. Arithmetic optimizations tailored to complex Machine Learning and High Fidelity Mobile Gaming use cases provide 25% higher energy efficiency, 20% better performance density and 40% greater overall performance over typical 2017 devices, Whereas Broadcom VideoCore IV was a technology of mid 2015’s.

Enough Memory For Desktop-based OSes :

1GB of LPDDR2 RAM @ 900Hz sounds quite low for a SBC that’s advertised as nearly-there Desktop PC. Raspberry Pi 4 should have 2GB (or even 4GB) of LPDDR4 RAM with faster cycles. Having ample of RAM will help in running more complex operating systems (even Windows 10) and sophisticated programs (video editors, Cache based apps, etc).

GigaByte Supported Ethernet :

Currently the Raspberry Pi 3 has a 10/100 ethernet controller, It’s maximum theoretical throughput is 100 Mbps. The (not-newer) Gigabyte supported ethernet specifies the maximum theoretical throughput as 1000 Mbps. With this upgrade, one can seriously consider hooking up his/her Pi as a web/app server.
We would also like PoE to be remain added in Raspberry Pi 4, As it allows us to draw current over ethernet line via PoE Adapter.

USB, M.2, SATA & Thunderbird Port :

The most notorious bottleneck of Raspberry Pi 3 would be its ancient USB 2.0 Ports. While it was okay in 2015, with the draw of 2018, Newer, more efficient ports are generalized. Support for USB 3.0 would make USB-attached drives far more attractive, allowing data to be transferred over a link with a maximum speed of 10Gbps, 20x that of the Pi’s existing USB 2.0 ports, Thunderbolt 3-compatible USB Type-C ports can handle power, data, and video transfer – meaning that one USB-C port could do the job of every existing input found on the Pi 3. They’re also substantially smaller than full-size USB Type-A ports, which would allow the Pi 4 to have a much slimmer profile
Any chance to remove eMMc storage, Be it via SATA or m.2, Would be very welcomed. While performing database related tasks, I.e Running a LEMP+Wordpress server, would benefit greatly with faster access times of SSD with a fraction of power consumption.

Wireless Connectivity :

RPi now also belong to another class, IoT. Internet of Things is a collection of connected devices helping you in digital tasks. While Raspberry Pi 3 supports some features, here are some things that will make it even better:

• 5Ghz WiFi Support. (Present in B+)
• BLE 4.2 Bluetooth Support.
• (Software Side) DLNA Support.
• HAT Support for NFC, WwLAN Cards.
• A Nano-SIM slot for 4G LTE Compatible connections.

HAT’s & Coolers :

Raspberry Pi is a device to be tinkered with, And to be tinkered with means more heat generation. While there are numerous generic 0.2amps 40x40x40 Fans available that can be plugged in GPIO, A Dedicated cooler like one seen on Odroid X2 would help a lot in maintaining temperatures. It would also assist in Overclocking and Throttling.
While there are a lot of Hardware Attached Accessories available with RPi3, It would be a demanding task to make the GPIO on Pi4 backward compatible. We would also like some easy to use and affordable Cluster-HAT’s, So we can connect multiple RPi’s together.

Community & Raspberry Pi 4 Software :

If there is one thing we can all agree on, It is that Raspberry Pi is the number #1 selling equipment in Single Board Computer, IoT and Experimental board categories, And the biggest factor for this is the Community around this silicon board. Millions of people help each other everyday on topics related to RPi. The RasFO. spents a lot of its resources on community related events, Such as Podcasts, Interviews, Forums, Helpdesks, Etc.
While this is great, we expect more from RasFO. and us.

A Great way of expanding our community is to add more OS’es to it. If Windows 10 were to be ported (not saying it’s not) to RPi, A lot of crowd should join as a majority if people are baffled by the console based interface of Unix. RPi4 Should also support (stable) Android based OS, As it adds a lot of applications from play store to Raspberry Pi ecosystem.