Buy a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B | Hacker News Reader

Buy a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B

raspberrypi.org

95 pointsbenn_8846 comments

Interesting differences to the pi 3 io is the dual hdmi out.

I don't use the hdmi out very much on any of my pis so I find this interesting. Are people using these as workstations? Even with stripped down Debian they seem kind of slow even just browsing the web.

Was thinking the same thing. It can drive two 4k displays. Yay! Who the hell uses these like that?

That's two menu screens at a fast food restaurant.

(They need not be 4k, of course.)

They get used as a 'kiosk' a lot, even for commercial use. I'm guessing this caters to that need.

I’ve often noticed Pi’s attached to the back of tvs running adverts in retail situations. Perhaps this has something to do with it.

Apart from work, we learned to write bare bone code on these so it was necessary having an HDMI output.

Our project was to re create a classic game without using the OS, straight up programming on metal. So the HDMI was much needed.

Definitely !

I do not use my laptop's keyboard, mouse or monitor.

Everything is external for me.

A much more powerful rPi means it might be possible to ditch the laptop form factor for good.

The only missing piece of technology for me is a laptop body WITHOUT a compute core ( only screen and a cheap keyboard ).

So that I can attach a rPi at the back.

Linux runs very well on ARM, in relation to Intel. and the power consumption is tiny !

I can run an rPi on portable battery for days !

it would be really cool if I could attach, reattach multiple battery pack onto my laptop.

There's the Nexdock / Nexdock 2 [0], if to be believed that will be shipping later this year, And some other projects listed here in a Purism thread [1]

[0] http://nexdock.com/ [1] https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-shell-idea-razer-project-lin...

This is the opposite though as it forces one to use the laptop form factor.

Is the opposite of what? Wrong variable was asking for a laptop without compute part to which they could strap a Pi. That’s exactly what the Nexdock is at least.

Education users? K-12 classroom use probably would be as workstations, and dual displays would be useful for the teacher (monitor + projector).

Looking at the 3 vs. 4, my eye went to the memory options—up to 4GB in the 4, versus 1GB in the 3—the USB 3 ports, and the fact that the 4 just says "Gigabit Ethernet", not "Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0". H.265 hardware decoding's pretty big too. Had made them a subpar choice for Kodi boxes and such for a while.

I... may be getting a few of these. I'd skipped the 3 on account of how the 2 turned out to be kind of a bust for me (have three, none in use...) but the faster IO and higher RAM options makes these one hell of a lot more useful. At 4GB you can kinda use the web, even, as long as you shy away from using more than one or two "web apps" (to include Electron) at a time.

(Nitpicking: real gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0 is impossible, USB 2.0 is limited to 480 Mbit. Still better than 100 Mbit Ethernet.)

Yeah, I know, that's why the old one sucked.

[EDIT] sucked is harsh—it did what it said it would. It sucked if you actually wanted to use the Pi for serious IO of any kind. USB2.0 and Ethernet limited to USB2.0 speeds was no good at all for that.

Yeah, for the first time it's true gigabit. Results from iperf:

Raspberry Pi 3B: 94Mb/s Raspberry Pi 3B+: 285Mb/s Raspberry Pi 4B: 930Mb/s

https://twitter.com/ben_nuttall/status/1143037993957187584

Imagine that you want to build a dashboard (performance, build status, things like that) for a roomful of engineers.

Yes, you pick an RPi, an cheap but large 720p TV, and you've got an wireless dashboard device for under $200 and couple of hours spent setting it up.

I'm not sure how common it is to use it as a workstation, but I've seen a lot of instances where a pi is used to power displays in business settings. Think internal things like dashboards, team/company messages, project calendars, etc. As well as external facing things such as menu boards, "Welcome" messages behind front desks, building directories, etc.

Whether a pi is the most appropriate device for that is another matter, but it seems to be a frequent enough use. And being able to power dual screens in these scenarios would be really helpful.

That said, between the marketing messaging and this[1], it seems like they really are pushing it as a potential low-powered workstation. So maybe that is something people do...

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-desktop-...

I've also seen it used as dumb clients for POS-like things.

Imagine the screens technicians at the lube center you get your oil changed at use to lookup your information.

It took a few years for me to accept this, but the ongoing commitment to continuing to make available most Raspberry Pis is a pretty compelling argument for many business purposes over using a random old used PC or a more powerful SBC that may not longer be available in a year. The development of specialized OS distributions for some of these tasks only furthers the strength of the choice for going with what could be otherwise under powered hardware.

Link to release blog entry: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-...

(submitted as: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20260863)

A step up to A72 cores while retaining the same price is huge. Kudo to the Raspberry Pi team.

This looks like an awesome upgrade. These are the biggest highlights to me:

>The Ethernet controller on the main SoC is connected to an external Broadcom PHY over a dedicated RGMII link, providing full throughput. USB is provided via an external VLI controller, connected over a single PCI Express Gen 2 lane, and providing a total of 4Gbps of bandwidth, shared between the four ports.

>we’re using the Mesa “V3D” driver developed by Eric Anholt [...] It also eliminates roughly half of the lines of closed-source code in the platform.

Neat, I really like the raspberry pis.

There are often better specs to buy but not with the same support and community - and that is worth a lot! However I'm not thrilled with the apparent price point of the new ones.

The prices I get are €46,83 – €66,96. Which I guess will settle a bit with time but it is a huge step up from any previous Pi.

depends on the RAM and extras. pure pi with 1gb and no power adapter/cable/case is still ~35€. the more expensive options are with either 4gb ram and/or bundles.

4GB RAM is a lot better than before, but I had hoped for 8GB. If the Raspi had a decent amount of RAM I would seriously consider using one as my main computer.

it seems to be the soc limit. I've only seen more than 4gb on custom arm server boards.

My phone has 6GB

Your phone probably has a CPU which costs as much (or nearly as much as the Raspi itself). The Raspi CPUs are never the most sophisticated on the market. Odroid used to make SBCs with the same CPUs as flagship Samsung phones, and they cost $150-200 a board.

Yes, but it's not a custom Arm server board

Earlier submission with lots of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20260863

Is the Gigabit Ethernet finally not over the USB 2.0 bus?

Looks that way. And it got two USB 3.0 ports. And up to 4GB of RAM (there are now multiple options). Hello new home file server, I think.

Amazing improvements. Seems like they are getting much closer I'm terms of performance to ODROID.

Has anyone found a reference to the Wifi / Bluetooth chipset? Is it the same one as on the 3b+?

It now supports Bluetooth 5.0

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/...

> 2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz IEEE 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 5.0, BLE

I was hoping for dual ethernet, to use as a cheap firewall. Dual everything else except that.

Pretty sure there is one orange pi or Banana pi for that.

You could buy a ( usb -> ethernet ) cable for less than 5 dollars.

I use ( usb -> ethernet ) for the rPi zero.

You even get ( usb -> ( ethernet, usb, usb , usb ) ) accessory, which is really cool.

I have one of the larger ones (3 usb + Ethernet). I received it as a gift and was originally skeptical of the usefulness of the usb ports vs the size tradeoff, but it turns out to be super useful. It stays on my desk with my mouse, keyboard, and printer plugged in, and acts as a pseudo-dock for my laptop. Very nice!

USB 3 should drive enough throughput to do that if you want.

The NanoPi R1 looks interesting but lacks the software support on mainline / upstream that RPi has https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

Probably better going for something like the Espressobin or even a C3000 series Atom.

Use VLANs to separate the external/internal connections.

That requires you have a switch on the other side that supports VALNs -- something generally a lot more expensive than the Pi itself.

I just bought a 3B+ 2 weeks ago and was running into issues with my server needing a bit more memory. Glad to see the 4GB option and I am going to get one of these and return the old one.

Just ordered two 4GB variants. They're getting strong enough to replace my 3 node proxmox cluster at home for most of my services.

Not happy with micro-HDMI though.

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