
The $35 Raspberry Pi 4 now comes with double the RAM - jmsflknr
https://www.engadget.com/2020/02/27/35-raspberry-pi-4-double-ram-2-GB/
======
kylec
More importantly, it also comes with a USB-C fix!

[https://betanews.com/2020/02/27/raspberry-pi-4-double-ram-
us...](https://betanews.com/2020/02/27/raspberry-pi-4-double-ram-usbc/)

~~~
wnevets
How do I know if what I'm buying has it?

~~~
kristianp

        cat /proc/cpuinfo
    

> If the revision reads “c03112” that means you are the lucky owner of a
> Raspberry Pi 4 Rev 1.2 board.

From [https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/24/raspberry-
pi-4-rev-1...](https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/24/raspberry-
pi-4-rev-1-2-fixes-usb-c-power-issues-improves-sd-card-resilience/)

~~~
mikewhy
That works after you've purchased it, but I think the person you're responding
to is looking for hints before purchase.

~~~
X-Cubed
That same link to CNX Software points out other hardware differences that you
can see on the board, such as the move of the SD card power switch.

------
dboreham
This article is super-confusing. You have been able to buy 4G Pi4's for a
while. What the article is reporting is actually a price decrease in the
smaller capacity 2G variant.

~~~
stan_rogers
Not especially, no. The core product is the $35 computer, and has been since
Raspberry Pi began. _That_ product, the $35 Raspberry Pi, now has 2GB of RAM.
Yes, other configurations are available, including the previous core product
if there's a reason why you'd want the 1GB version.

~~~
p1necone
The article seems to suggest that the 4gb model has been outselling the $35
one.

~~~
stan_rogers
That doesn't change anything. The RPi is all about the price point. Yes, you
can get other configurations, but the whole point of the Foundation is that
$35 (or cheaper) machine - an affordable computer, built to a specific price
point, with the aim of putting a "tinkering" computer into the hands of as
many kids (and interested adults) as possible. It's nice that people are
buying the things for various more mundane purposes, as that sort of
subsidizes the main purpose... but the main purpose is still to provide an
educational machine at an affordable price, and the $35 price point is a big
part of that.

------
sigjuice
The 1 GB model is still selling for $35.

EDIT:

From the original announcement

[https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-price-raspberry-
pi-4-2g...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/new-price-raspberry-pi-4-2gb/)

What about the 1GB product?

In line with our commitment to long-term support, the 1GB product will remain
available to industrial and commercial customers, at a list price of $35. As
there is no price advantage over the 2GB product, we expect most users to opt
for the larger-memory variant.

~~~
jacobush
There are various ways of clearing inventory, one is to let it sit a long time
on the shelves and selling it for more money for those who want the older
version, another is to lower the prices and get rid of it ASAP. Both have
merit.

~~~
klingonopera
And that then depends on the price per area of storage that you pay.

I've always wondered who buys old Pentium 3s for thousands of dollars on eBay,
but yeah... it can make sense, especially if that computer runs a factory
machine or something, and just needs a quick replacement part.

EDIT: ...otherwise wildly overpriced items on eBay are because trader has run
out of stock, wants to keep the same product page, but doesn't want anybody to
buy in the meantime. They do this, because items have rankings for which
appears first.

~~~
ryanmercer
>I've always wondered who buys old Pentium 3s for thousands of dollars on eBay

People trying to build their vintage dream machine mostly I suppose. Folks
like LGR on YouTube [0] to some degree will pay more than one would expect for
a specific piece of hardware and people building private collections in
general. That Nintendo-Playstation prototype unit is currently going for
300,000 USD [1] right now at auction (and I believe Palmer Luckey is still the
high bidder, he was a couple weeks ago per his Twitter).

I've paid an obscene (to me based on my income) amount for vintage tech
before, as well as other things that I collect ( for example 3x spot price for
an ugly silver art bar that most people would only pay spot for because that
specific variety of art bar has significance to us old time members of
/r/silverbugs and I wanted a second one).

I mean, remember when Bezos spent more money than most people make in their
lifetime to salvage an F1 engine from Apoloo 11 from the ocean floor? [3]

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/user/phreakindee/about](https://www.youtube.com/user/phreakindee/about)

[1] [https://comics.ha.com/itm/video-games/nintendo/nintendo-
play...](https://comics.ha.com/itm/video-games/nintendo/nintendo-play-station-
super-nes-cd-rom-prototype-sony-and-
nintendo-c-1992/a/7224-93060.s?ic4=GalleryView-ShortDescription-071515)

[3] [https://www.space.com/37830-jeff-bezos-apollo-rocket-
engines...](https://www.space.com/37830-jeff-bezos-apollo-rocket-engines-
recovery.html)

~~~
rubyn00bie
The whole space.com article (3 from above) about Bezos was worth it just for
the part about the boat's captain:

> "And I took my parents with me. My mom was the only woman in this group of
> 60 men on this boat," Bezos said.

> He added that the Norwegian boat captain advised Bezos when he boarded the
> boat that he had removed all the pornography, "out of respect" to Bezos'
> mother.

> "OK, thank you," Bezos told the captain.

------
vardump
It'd be amazing if Raspberry Pi Foundation managed to make a model with 64-bit
memory bus width instead of current 32-bit wide LPDDR4. RPi4 is heavily memory
bandwidth limited.

Yeah, I know, cost. One can still wish. Perhaps it'll be feasible for RPi4+ or
whatever the next upgrade is called.

~~~
zozbot234
> RPi4 is heavily memory bandwidth limited.

 _Everything_ is memory bandwidth limited, given enough clock speed + core
count (as is typical in modern systems). One more reason to write optimized
code and avoid pointless memory overhead.

~~~
bitwize
Nah fam. It's cool to write your text chat app or graphing calculator in
Electron. Moore's Law will totally catch up and people won't miss the hundreds
of MiB of RAM it takes up.

------
alexfromapex
I am building a cluster of the 4GB RPis with SSD for a personal cloud and so
far the 2 I have are awesome

~~~
mxie-ca
Please write up a blog when you have it fully working. I'm mostly interested
in which STAT to USB cable you pick. Also power consumption in general :)

~~~
jmb12686
I haven't written a blog, but I do have a 5 node RaspberryPi cluster running
Docker Swarm. The docker stacks and compose files are on GitHub
[https://github.com/jmb12686/raspi-docker-
stacks](https://github.com/jmb12686/raspi-docker-stacks)

Look at the 'gluster' branch for my current active work on clustered
persistent storage using SSDs and docker volume plugins.

I have setup quite a few GitHub projects for building / publishing
multiarchitecture ARM compatible images of open source projects
(Elasticsearch, Kibana, CAdvisor, etc). Check them out if interested in
running common tools on RaspberryPis.

------
ajaxguy
Would like to know if there are any cool projects with RPI for elementary
kids, just to get them understand the importance of these mini computers. Hope
they can pick up light programming too with this. Any pointers please.

~~~
flatiron
What do your kids like to do? Any chance you could integrate a computer with
it? My daughter loves to cook and dance and I haven’t found a way to integrate
that with computers but she’s happy so I haven’t pressed it.

~~~
eli
You could hook it up to some midi instruments

~~~
mixmastamyk
I tried that, the delay was too high to the synth. Not sure how to fix it.

------
sriram_sun
So if I order the 2GB version I can be assured that it would be the one with
the USB-C fix. Is that correct?

~~~
mattl
No, there are two 2GB versions.

------
ratiolat
I wish they'd: 1\. Provide standardised way to encrypt the whole disk 2\.
Support Debian by opening up their hardware so one could use stock debian on
it (which would also solve problem 1)

~~~
matheusmoreira
Open firmware would be very nice. Looks like these processors need a firmware
blob in order to even boot. Seems to be a standard "feature" these days.

~~~
dmitrygr
iMX6, for example, can boot with no closed blobs at all. vote with your money

~~~
ratiolat
Thanks for the tip! Please provide a link where one can buy such a system
which is on par, featurewise, with a raspberry pi 4. The critical features
are: 4GiB of ram or more, wifi, bluetooth, 4k hdmi, 2xUSB ports, atleast 2
cores with comparable performance to RPi 4, same ballpark price.

~~~
dmitrygr
nowhere. freedom isn't free

you'll pay extra for iMX

BUT it is 100% open. you said you wanted that

------
ckocagil
No, thank you. If I'm going to buy a hobby computer it absolutely shouldn't
have a proprietary SoC without a public datasheet. This rules out anything by
Broadcom.

~~~
vzcx
Do you have a recommendation?

Rockchip seems ok, with docs open source tools but I wish they were better,
and it's still a proprietary SOC, of course.

~~~
squarefoot
There are many. The Raspberries are great value for the money as video
players, also because of the really good CEC implementation, but for
everything else, and I really mean everything else, there are much better
powerful or cheap, sometimes both, alternatives.

Take a look at this list which is being updated roughly twice a year, and
don't miss the downloadable spreadsheet comparison tables.

[http://linuxgizmos.com/ringing-in-the-new-year-
with-136-open...](http://linuxgizmos.com/ringing-in-the-new-year-
with-136-open-spec-linux-sbcs-under-200/)

Those however are the new entries; on manufacturers homepages there are "old"
models that are still of interest today. Here are two examples.

[https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c2/](https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c2/)

[https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...](https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=69&product_id=234)

------
totiousti
I use the 1gb as a public facing webserver. working super fine.

------
jandrese
I assume this means they're going to stop producing the 1GB version? Or is
there some reason to opt for it still? Lower power consumption maybe? Still,
it seems like 99% of users are going to opt for the one that has double the
memory at the same price.

~~~
paulmd
Often this means that the older/smaller RAM chip has been discontinued or
production has decreased enough that it is now _more_ expensive than the
bigger chip.

Example: this was the driving force behind the AMD R9 390/390X launch. Supply
of the old 4 Gb modules was drying up and it was actually cheaper to switch to
8 Gb modules.

~~~
gmiller123456
Seems like that would only explain an increase in the 1Gb version. The only
reasons for a price drop in the 2Gb version is that it either got cheaper to
make it, or the market told them $45 was too high and they had to cut their
profit margin.

IMHO, $10 for an extra 1Gb of RAM is pretty excessive. So I'm glad to see the
market (probably) has spoken.

------
kstrauser
I have an RPi4 as a home server now. It's not a supercomputer, but it has
plenty of oomph to host my IMAP email and other related stuff. The onboard
storage is super-slow, though, so you'd definitely want some faster external
stores (I use NFS to my Synology).

~~~
kens
> I have an RPi4 as a home server now. It's not a supercomputer...

Out of curiosity, I looked up the performance numbers for the RPi4 and the
Cray-1 supercomputer, the world's fastest computer in 1977. The RPi4 gets 748
megaflops on the LINPACK benchmark, compared to 14 megaflops on the Cray. The
Cray used high-speed ECL logic allowing it to run at a blistering 80 Mhz clock
rate compared to 1.5 GHz on the RPi4. The Cray-1 sold for $7.9 million,
compared to $35. It had 8 megabytes of RAM and weighed 5.5 tons compared to 2
GB of RAM and 46 grams. Power consumption was 115 kW vs under 15 watts. The
numbers drive home just how much computer technology has improved.

~~~
kstrauser
To be sure! Our expectations of what a computer required to do $task looks
like has dramatically changed, too. Last week a coworker was surprised that I
deployed a tiny service on a t2.nano EC2 instance. "Shouldn't we put that on
something bigger?" Well, the thing is entirely blocked on waiting for network
IO, so putting it on a server with 32 cores isn't going to make it run any
faster. Also, under full load it only used 32MB of RAM, so giving it 8GB isn't
going to help it any.

Bringing it back to the RPi: people ask if it's powerful enough to serve
simple web apps and email. Oh, it most certainly is! It can handle most of
what you'd want a home server to do, short of something like Plex transcoding.

~~~
baebeegeezus
One of my first jobs in 1997 was as a network admin, setting up an email, web
server and firewall for our 100 person office. Used a 486 DX2/66 with 16MB
(not GB!) RAM running RedHat, obviously very minimal without X or GUIs. The
Internet line was only 128kb/s, so the CPU was underutilized most of the time.

~~~
kstrauser
Hah, much the same here. We were on some sweet Pentium 133s on Debian, and
even our blistering fast 4 bonded T-1s weren't enough to make them break a
sweat.

I know MHz isn't everything, but a 1.5GHz quad-core ARM is abundantly
sufficient for running Wordpress and Django and a PostgreSQL backend with
plenty of room to spare.

------
Brakenshire
Anyone have any idea what’s the current state of mainline kernel support for
Raspberry Pi?

~~~
ynezz
It's almost there </sarcasm>:

    
    
      origin git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git
      rpi https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux.git
    
      $ git diff --shortstat origin/linux-4.19.y..rpi/rpi-4.19.y
      911 files changed, 321070 insertions(+), 5576 deletions(-)
    
      $ git diff --shortstat origin/linux-5.4.y..rpi/rpi-5.4.y
      810 files changed, 309964 insertions(+), 2518 deletions(-)
    
      $ git diff --shortstat origin/linux-5.5.y..rpi/rpi-5.5.y
      820 files changed, 308669 insertions(+), 2420 deletions(-)

------
cs02rm0
Because of falling RAM prices, but no price cut for the one with even more
RAM?

~~~
kstrauser
Consider here that the RAM is part of the SoC and not a discrete part. They
can't take an RPi board and slap a larger RAM chip on it.

~~~
Narishma
That's not the case on the Raspberry Pi 4. RAM is a separate chip that sits
next to the SoC.

~~~
kstrauser
Huh, maybe you're right. I was sure it was part of the SoC but it looks like
that's not the case.

------
hornbaker
Anyone know if the Pi will work with a Chameleon3 USB3 camera from flir.com?
If anyone has computer vision coding experience with a setup like this, pls
email me (profile), contract opp potentially.

~~~
dguaraglia
Apparently that camera is compatible with v4l2 ("video for Linux 2") so it
should work just fine on the RPi 4 provided you have the right cable. Here's a
thread where some people discuss using it and similar cameras on the ODroid
(which would use the same Linux subsystem):
[https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?t=6259](https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?t=6259)

------
nimbius
Does it still have thermal problems?

~~~
grovellogic
Define thermal problems? They get warm, but newer firmware seems to do much
better than the first ones.You could just add a fan and not worry about it.

~~~
opless
My early version one (4Gb version), was terrible. I _had_ to buy a fan (thank
pimoroni) to stop it thermal throttling.

It was quite poor in performance (youtube tearing a lot, usb keyboard issues,
freezing occasionally)

I hope when I plug it in again and update it, things will have stabilised a
bit.

~~~
vardump
I also had an early 4 GB model (well, two of them), and parent post is
absolutely correct about initial thermal issues — it was running hot and
throttling very heavily.

Later firmware releases improved things a lot.

~~~
opless
So I ought to update it and have another go ?

~~~
vardump
Let's see, my two updated RPi4 4GBs, no added cooling, both idling:

    
    
      $ vcgencmd measure_temp
      temp=47.0'C
    
      $ vcgencmd measure_temp
      temp=50.0'C
    

Not amazing, but good enough for me.

~~~
opless
I'll give it another go this coming week then!

Cheers!

------
Joyfield
All I want for Christmas is you... nah, a SATA-port or a M2.

------
znpy
since we're talking raspberry pis... does anybody know if the rpi4 can
netboot?

~~~
Zenst
[https://hackaday.com/2019/11/11/network-booting-the-
pi-4/](https://hackaday.com/2019/11/11/network-booting-the-pi-4/)

------
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
This thing desperately needs and m.2 slot. I can’t handle doing anything on an
SD card. The write speeds are horrendous.

~~~
jokoon
If not a m2 slot it should at least have 1GB or 2GB of soldered storage.

~~~
joosters
They have 1-4GB of ultra-fast soldered storage already! Just don’t skimp on
the battery backup...

~~~
jokoon
storage or ram?

~~~
joosters
Unreliable storage, unfortunately. My Pi never seems to survive a reboot, so I
have to take regular backups to prevent data loss.

------
luckylion
Clickbait.

It's "you can now get the 2gb version for $35, which was/is the price point
for the 1gb version", not "raspberry pi now has double the RAM".

~~~
inetknght
> _It 's "you can now get the 2gb version for $35, which was/is the price
> point for the 1gb version", not "raspberry pi now has double the RAM"._

Yeah, I was expecting an 8GB model :'(

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
That _would_ be pretty fun. Weird, of course, since I still think of the Pi as
a "small" computer in terms of resources as well as size, and I've got laptops
with 4GB of RAM... of course, in a world where some phones are about to hit
16GB of RAM, maybe my kit is just obsolete;)

~~~
znpy
on a sidenote, ram on laptops has been steady a bit too much imho.

we're stuck on 8/16 gb since quite a while. higher end models are starting to
show up with 64gb, but to me it seems that it's kinda of an artificial
limitation.

~~~
magicalhippo
RAM eats battery life so there's a trade-off when it comes to laptops.

