The $35 Raspberry Pi 4 now comes with double the RAM | Hacker News Reader

The $35 Raspberry Pi 4 now comes with double the RAM

engadget.com

284 pointsjmsflknr130 comments

More importantly, it also comes with a USB-C fix!

https://betanews.com/2020/02/27/raspberry-pi-4-double-ram-us...

Original article source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/21/pi_4_fixed/

We asked Upton this week if the fix was out and he confirmed the update had indeed been rolled into a PCB Design for Manufacturing (DFM) process. He added that he would have expected the update "to have reached end users by now".

There are versions of Raspberry pi 4 with the fix, but it is possible that these discounted ones don't have it yet. In a recent interview they mentioned that they expected majority of sold RPI4s to be the 2GB version. I think they simply overmanufactured those and that led to the price drop.

Yeah, the fixed version people have been seeing in the wild is the 4GB, which is the one that had more demand than expected and was out of stock a lot of the time.

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

    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...

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

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.

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.

Thanks for pointing this out. I literally bought a Pi4 yesterday to set up a Pi-Hole on, and I was choked when I read this headline!

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.

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

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.

Yes, it is. We deal with Raspberry Pis every day at work (for... reasons) and even I had to re-read a couple times to understand what they were talking about. It would've been easier for them to say 'for the same price you paid the original RPi, now you can get an RPi 4 with double the memory the original had and much, much faster processor'.

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...

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.

This is most probably for those who need exactly the same configuration they already use in production.

The 1GB model is $30 on Adafruit right now, and $35 for the 2 GB model.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/4292

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.

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.

It's always worth checking the 'sold' listings to see what prices actually sell. Sometimes they do regularly sell at the inflated price, but often they don't.

>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

[1] https://comics.ha.com/itm/video-games/nintendo/nintendo-play...

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

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.

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

It also depends on your cash flow / economic considerations - you may not wish to have 1 M$ in merchandise sitting in storage, waiting for it to be sold in about 10 years.

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.

> 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.

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.

Just displaying a still image at 4k @60 Hz consumes 2 GB/s out of mere RPi4's 9.6 GB/s theoretical. Graphics is one of the biggest reasons I'd like more bandwidth.

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

How are you hooking up the SSDs?

USB to SATA cable and the SATA drives are small enough that they can sit inside the rack I bought for the Pis for now even though I'll eventually have to get them their own rack or something

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 :)

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

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.

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.

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.

You could hook it up to some midi instruments

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

RoboCup Junior OnStage is a good example of integrating dance with computers. You can program sensors to detect triggers from humans and respond by moving props into place. There's a lot of freedom to choose what type of sensors, computers, and actuators to use. Search for videos of RoboCup OnStage to see some examples.

https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects?hardware%5B%5D=...

There are endless possibilities. Kids would likely appreciate something like creating a console game emulator or wiring up hardware sensors to the raspberry pi.

It doesn't exist, afaik, but a Rocky's Boots would be a nice thing to have on a pi.

Have them set up a minecraft server with spigot if you have the 4G version. And then they can do mods and even make the server available over the internet if you can set up port forwarding and stuff. Yeah, not the most programming heavy task, but it's a good example to teach kids how these services actually work.

Look into Kano computers. They come as set of RPi, display, case and battery. Then kids assemble their own "tablet".

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?

No, there are two 2GB versions.

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)

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.

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

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.

nowhere. freedom isn't free

you'll pay extra for iMX

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

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

Side question: Are already SBCs with the i.MX8 available that have a price that is suitable for individual customers; let's say: < 250 EUR or USD?

$135 - https://boundarydevices.com/product/nitrogen8m/

2. https://pete.akeo.ie/2019/07/installing-debian-arm64-on-rasp...

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.

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.

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...

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.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

From above

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22438082

But isn't that roughly about EVERY computer? Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Ti, Apple, Marvell... etc.

No. Even if proprietary, you can find very detailed datasheets and guides to program most of those. Try finding a Broadcom SoC datasheet and you'll quickly understand what I mean. They're protected like nuclear launch codes.

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

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.

At least right now looks like some places [0] are selling the 1GB for $30. Maybe until stock runs out.

[0] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4292

"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."

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.

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.

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).

What do you mean by onboard storage? It uses microSD for storage, right?

Yeah. I use a Raspberry 2 for my mail server, but I use an SSD in a USB enclosure for mail spool. It's also faster, but above all, it's more robust than SD cards.

USB on all Raspberry Pi below 4 is capped at 480 mbit/sec due to it being USB2. Pi 4 has USB3, but it can interfere with 2.4 GHz signals.

Even the USB2 speeds are overkill for most server stuff, where you're more commonly making a bunch of small random accesses than long streaming reads or writes. Not that you can't, but most people are going to be running things like Wordpress or other relatively lightweight services on an RPi.

USB2 is still faster than all but V90 class MicroSD cards. And V90 cards are only rated for 90MB/s writes, not reads.

Even if you had a UHS-III V90 A2 card, a USB2 SSD is going to give you 10x the IOP/s performance.

mSD is slower than an SSD.

yes, the microSD card isn't known for being super speedy (but it's not absolutely terrible either).

In your experience, would an external SATA 2.5" SSD in a cheap cradle work faster than the MicroSD?

absolutely.

Which SD card class?

I bought an all-in-one kit (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VFCB192) with a Samsung EVO+ 32GB class 10 SD card. To be clear, it's not awful. For most stuff it's perfectly usable. Still, stuff like software upgrades and random server IO is a lot slower than on other media.

> 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.

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.

Why not Lambda then ?

It's a long-running, stateful process. I love Lambda but this wouldn't have been a good fit for it.

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.

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.

> The numbers drive home just how much computer technology has improved.

And how much bloated software has become.

Software bloat is part of it. The other part is that we just continue to use slow languages. Using python in production for large servers should be illegal due to wasted power.

Why? Most servers are network bound, not CPU bound.

Do you have any sources that modern servers which host dozen and maybe even hundreds of virtual machines are network bound? That doesn't seem logical at all.

What is most amazing: what people achieved with those 14 megaflops.

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

That happened last year, not sure which models were included but I would believe up to Pi3+

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(-)

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

Yeah I saw that and was like, 'a 2GB Pi 4 is $35 but a 4GB Pi 4 is $55? That's most of the way to buying two 2Gb Pi 4s'

That one probably sells like hot cake. There have been shortages on it for a long time since release.

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.

Is it not the stacking ram that's soldered to the top of the SoC?

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

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

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.

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

I think the Pi4 has a better USB stack, but the Pi3 has some stability problems with USB peripherals. I eventually (with the right boot parameters) got a Pi3 to run OpenCV on a webcam without occasionally locking up; the PiZero still occasionally chokes on a USB sound card for me. It'll probably work, but audio hats (using I2S) or a camera using the dedicated camera bus are more reliable, though more limited than USB peripherals.

Does it still have thermal problems?

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.

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.

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.

Agree. my 4GB model is at around 50C most of the time with pihole running. I don't have any heatsink/fan attached to it either

So I ought to update it and have another go ?

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.

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

Cheers!

Everything thermal throttles these days, but the early Pi4 firmware did it particularly poorly.

Bonus tip: if you want a performance boost on an old laptop, open it up and clean out the caked in dust. Extra points for cleaning and upgrading the thermal compound on the CPU

I bought it on release, and use it as a home server. It idles around 46.

Doesn't seem too hot to me. If you want graphs you can check here https://ci0s.xyz/api

I just leave it sitting on a shelf near router. No fans or heatsinks.

What do you use to generate that page? Any standard off-the-shelf software?

I wanted to try my hand at webdev. Its a custom built flask/gunicorn server serving matplotlib generated graphs with bootstrap css.

I use a pi4 4gb as my controller for my ubiquiti device and as a pi-hole. It has the PoE hat with the fan removed and a piece of aluminium tube filled with coins and thermal goo standing on the processor. It is in a hot room (about 32c) and even under stress on all cores I have never seen higher temps than 67c.

The usb chip is hot as F though, even with updated firmware.

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

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

https://hackaday.com/2019/11/11/network-booting-the-pi-4/

https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/blob/master/firmwa...

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

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

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

storage or ram?

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

Well you can break out the PCI-E that feeds the USB chip if you really need to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20399555

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".

> 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 :'(

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;)

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.

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

The title is exactly correct, the Raspberry Pi 4 that costs $35 does come with double the RAM now. The title doesn't say anything about any other price point configurations.

That's right, it's technically correct. And I'm sure that it's written that way to be technically correct while suggesting that they doubled the RAM of the raspberry pi. That's clickbait.

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