Micron Comes Through; 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 Is Here!

Here’s Why It Took So Long; And Hints At 16GB

When the RasPi originally launched in 2012, tinkerers and technophiles feel in love with the low cost and incredibly flexible little ARM based computer.  Since then there have been several updates which have added numerous new features to the Raspberry Pi, such as wireless connectivity and an additional HDMI connection.

The other internals of the new 8GB RasPi 4 are unchanged, a Broadcom BCM2711 and four Cortex-A72’s running @ 1.5 GHz.  The jump to 8GB is very important, as the RasPi looks towards moving to a 64bit operating system which would prefer larger pools of RAM.   Some enterprising minds have already created 64bit OSes to run on their RasPi to allow them to allocate more than 3GB to a single Linux process, but with a 4GB ceiling this has been more of a proof of concept, but getting 8GB will change that.

The reason for the delay of the 8GB for almost a year was due to a lack of a reliable supply of 8GB chips, which is now resolved as Micron starts cranking them out in larger numbers.  Along with the new hardware comes a 64-bit beta image as well as the revelation that the architecture can address up to 16 GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM, so we can expect to see even more impressive RasPi models in the future.

There are repercussions to this upgrade of course, expect to pay around $75 for the new 8GB model.