Raspberry Pi 4 : The Hottest Pie Yet ! Review+Where To Buy

Its finally here, I cant believe my eyes. The Pi Foundation this morning just announced a BRAND-NEW, SUPER BUFFED RASPBERRY PI 4 !

And Yes, It is what we expected (and much more) :

Raspberry Pi 4 : First Peek :

You can tell its a lot different just by looking at it. We can see the most unique feature first : The Two Micro-HDMI Outputs ! Other than that, There a new Type-C port for power input, Two new USB 3.0 Ports, A Gigabyte Ethernet Port and some legacy features such as 40-Pin GPIO, Camera Connectors and a 3mm Composite jack. Raspberry Pi 4 looks to be precisely fabricated, a work of art.

Raspberry Pi 4 : Whats New ?

 

Dual Micro HDMI Ports : Connect Multiple 4k-res Displays to your rig and enjoy seamless workspace across dual monitors. A major step in making RaspberryPi a full-fledged Desktop.

USB 3.0 : YaYY :We finally have the latest I/O port on our favorite SBC. The new USB 3.0 means faster access to external HDD’s, and now one can finally find the benifits of connecting a SSD to his/her Pi. The Pi 4 also has its own data bus, Meaning it now doesn’t share its bandwidth with Ethernet port.

Gigabit Ethernet : What NAS lovers always wanted. Faster Gigabit ethernet means faster server on you Pi. Any kind of server be it LAMP, SQL, NAS, FTP or any !

Choice of RAM : Now we can buy our pi in 1GB, 2GB and 4GB RAM capacities. Its now more fast too, Pi 4 has bumped the LPDDR2 standard to LPDDR4. Android and other desktop OS’es, We are coming for you !

Broadcom BCM2711 SoC : Maybe one of the most requested update, The new Broadcom BCM2711 System-on-Chip features four Cortex-A72 cores clocked at 1.5GHz instead of Cortex-A53 ticking at 1.4GHz. This alone means about 3x better performance compared to the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. Its also thinner measuring at 28nm.

Connectivity Update : The new Raspberry Pi 4 features BlueTooth 5.0, Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, And A microSD storage controller update with a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 50 Mbps, up from 25 Mbps. We still got the old 40 Pin GPIO Connector tho.

What does it mean though ?

Raspberry Pi 4 is super buffed, Its almost the equivalent of 2016’s Android Devices. The Update in CPU means more computational power, The new 500MHz VideoCore VI GPU, jacked from 400MHz previously means more Graphics Power. Now its a reality to decode 4k Media on a raspberry pi. The GPU buff along with Dual HDMI means seamless workspace, Which would help raspberry pi while setting it up for Office/Production use. Faster and Bigger RAM’s would help us in running more complex operating systems, and USB 3.0 means being able to run them from a Pendrive or external Hard-Disks.
We have some benchmarks (courtesy of MagPi) to help you understand better :

Speedometer 2.0 (browser speed test) :

OpenArena Time Demo (GPU speed test) :

Memory bandwidth (RAMspeed/SMP tool) :

Python GPIO Zero (CPU Speed):

File compression (multi-threaded lbzip2) :

GIMP image editing :

USB storage throughput :

Ethernet throughput :

Wireless LAN throughput :

Power draw :

 

Pricing, Where to buy :

The Raspbery Pi 4 has maintained its Brand Value price of 35$ for the base, The Pricing goes as follows :

Raspberry Pi 4 [1GB RAM] : $35 (3215 INR Including GST)
Raspberry Pi 4 [2GB RAM] : $45 (3999 INR Including GST)
Raspberry Pi 4 [4GB RAM] : $55 (4250 INR excluding Tax, Total : 5000 INR)

My Indian Brothers can go and buy this latest Raspberry Pi 4 from these distributors :

Module143.com
ROBU.IN
SilverLineElectronics

Or For People Elsewhere, You can find your local distributor here :

RaspberryPi.org