Raspberry Pi 4 B

Les Pounder loves a surprise and a Raspberry Pi – so when the Pi 4 was released, he was over the moon!

- Les Pounder

Surprise! June is not a traditional release date for a Raspberry Pi. In fact, this new version of the Pi breaks a few traditions. Firstly, it was released far earlier than predicted due to the BCM2711 System on Chip (SoC) being ready for production some nine to 12 months early. Secondly, there’s the price: there is now not just one price for a Raspberry Pi Model B, but three. At £34, the basic model comes with 1GB of RAM; for £44 there is a 2GB model; and for £54 there is a 4GB model. For this review we have chosen to look at the 1GB model as we can directly compare it to previous models of Pi.

No matter the version of Pi 4, all come with a 1.5GHz 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A72 CPU (Arm v8, BCM2711B0) and all of the RAM is now LPDDR4, giving us a much-needed boost in performance. GPU duties are handled by the new VideoCore VI which supports OpenGL ES3.0 and provides another handy boost in performance.

If you are a keen maker/hacker then fear not, as the 40-pin GPIO is present and fully compatible with HAT and pHAT boards. But in a change to previous GPIO configurations, the GPIO of the Pi4 offers four each of I2C, UART and SPI interfaces, enabling more compatible devices to be connected – all by changing the device tree overlay on boot.

For network connectivity, we are truly spoilt. While the Pi 4 retains the excellent 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi from the 3B+, we finally have true gigabit Ethernet on a Raspberry Pi thanks to the BCM54213 Ethernet chip, which provided a stonking 931Mbits/sec in our test – around three times faster than the 3B+. No more Ethernet through USB!