The new Raspberry Pi 4 is here! And here at
Yodeck we are all very excited. In fact, we
just got it in the mail. Our first impressions?
The new Raspberry Pi is more powerful than
ever. All the upgrades make the new Pi a decent
SBC priced at a reasonable price. We also
found out there are a few tweaks we didn't
expect, and I'm sure nobody did. You can also
find the link to the full review at the description
below which we will be updating in the next
days. So let's get to it! We're going to open
a boxed one. What's new about the Raspberry
Pi 4? Our favorite: dual HDMI ports. The Raspberry
Pi 4 has support (at least, the hardware does)
for driving two screens at the same time through
HDMI. These can be used either in a mirror
configuration or in an extended desktop type
of screen setup. The two display ports are
actually micro-HDMI which means that you need
a micro-HDMI-to-HDMI adapter or cable. It
also has 4K resolution and 4K video decoding.
The Raspberry Pi 4 can decode up to 4K video
at 60FPS encoded in H.265. H.264 decoding
is only supported for up to 1080p at 60FPS.
Both codecs are supported out of the box,
so no extra licenses are required. And it
has more memory! The Raspberry Pi provides
3 options for the total amount of memory soldered
on the board, and they are priced accordingly.
The 1GB version comes at a price of $35 US.
The 2GB version costs $45 US, and the 4GB
version costs $55 US. Also, memory is now
LPDDR4 and has triple the bandwidth to the
CPU compared to Raspberry Pi 3 B+ which will
make things even faster. And of course it
has a faster CPU. Broadcom's CPU code-named
BCM2711 based on 28nm silicon. It's still
passively cooled and without a heat sink required.
Although most will use one for high load applications.
It includes 4 Cortex-A72 cores clocked at
1.5 GHz which should provide a big speed bump
from the previous Raspberry Pi. The older
one used in the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ had 4 Cortex-A53
cores clocked at 1.2 GHz. So with the new
Pi you should be getting a theoretical performance
gain of about 2.25x. The official announcement
mentions a 2x or 4x speed bump, which sounds
cool. The new board includes 2 USB 3.0 ports,
the ones with the blue plastic, along with
2 USB 2.0 ones with the black plastic. Gigabit
Ethernet is now fully supported. Bluetooth
5.0 is also supported, so longer range and
less power used. It also has an improved GPU,
and it uses a USB-C power connector, which
you plug in right here. You will need to get
a new case for the new Pi, as you can see,
as the connectors now have a different layout,
and the old case won't fit anymore. As we
mentioned earlier, the price tag begins at
$35, same as the older version, which we consider
fair. Make sure you click on the full review
in the description below, to get more details,
updates and information on the Raspberry Pi
4 software.
