Raspberry Pi 4 now comes with up to 8GB of RAM for $75
The Raspberry Pi 4 was announced close to a year ago. It provided amazing specs in the all-familiar credit card-sized presentation and proved to be a well-received successor to the Raspberry Pi 3. Among some of the improvements that were included with this device were a more powerful ARM SoC, a USB-C power supply, and several RAM options including 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB. Let’s go back to the RAM for a bit, though: The Raspberry Pi Foundation is now adding a new 8GB RAM tier for the Pi 4, priced at just $75.
According to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, an 8GB version of the Raspberry Pi 4 was always part of their plans, and it even seemingly accidentally showed up on documents such as the Beginner’s Guide. The Raspberry Pi 4’s BCM2711 chip can actually handle up to 16GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM, but according to the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s official blog post, a suitable 8GB RAM module didn’t exist until late last year after the device was released. Now that the part exists, though, this version can be released. There are also a couple of changes made to the design of the board itself, including new switchers and inductors, in order to accommodate the higher power demands that 8GB of RAM requires. Apparently, the COVID-19 pandemic also set back the release date of this model as the inductor supply from Asia was interrupted.
8GB of RAM also requires a 64-bit OS on board, but Raspberry Pi’s default OS doesn’t support that yet. At least it didn’t until now, as the team has released an early 64-bit beta of its own OS, which will probably have its fair share of bugs initially (that will be eventually ironed out). The team is now calling its Debian-based OS “Raspberry Pi OS,” by the way, but users can choose to install other GNU/Linux distributions ported for ARM64 such as Ubuntu or Gentoo.
Speaking of software, the Raspberry team has done “enormous amounts of work to reduce the idle and loaded power consumption of the device, passed OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance, started work on a Vulkan driver, and shipped PXE network boot mode and a prototype of USB mass storage boot mode” since initially shipping the Pi 4.
Oh, and as a fun fact, the 1GB RAM version is no longer available for purchase as the official site lists only 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB versions. The 2GB version now costs $35, which is the same price that the 1GB version originally had. It’s probably safe to assume that this 1GB RAM version was completely discontinued. Oddly enough, this wasn’t mentioned in the blog post at all, but it also means you’re getting twice the RAM for the same price, so I don’t think anyone will miss it.
You can purchase an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 for $75 right now on their website.
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