It’s the Raspberry Pi that ate all the pies: The latest release of the tiddly single board computer packs 8GB of RAM for the first time; an option likely to prove enticing for Pi power users.
Raspberry Pi reckons its latest offering is enough to run “heavy server workloads”; or at least “more browser tabs”. (Other uses to which the Pi has been put? Hacking NASA…)
The 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 is shipping for £74.
Read this: Hackers Breached Primary NASA Network with Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton said today: “The real barrier to our offering a larger-memory variant was the lack of an 8GB LPDDR4 package. These didn’t exist (at least in a form that we could address) in 2019, but happily our partners at Micron stepped up earlier this year with a suitable part.
(His business has shipped over three million Raspberry Pi 4s in the past year alone, as its popularity shows no sign of waning).
8GB Raspberry Pi: OS Gets a New Name
The Raspberry Pi foundation also today said it was renaming its Operating System (OS) from Raspbian to Raspberry Pi OS.
Its default operating system image still uses a 32-bit LPAE kernel and a 32-bit userland. “Power users, who want to be able to map all 8GB into the address space of a single process, need a 64-bit userland”, Upton noted today. “There are plenty of options already out there, including Ubuntu and Gentoo.
“Not to be left out, today we’ve released an early beta of our own 64-bit operating system image. This contains the same set of applications and the same desktop environment that you’ll find in our regular 32-bit image, but built against the Debian arm64 port.”
The power supply components on the board have also been switched around ,with the company removing a power supply from the right-hand side of the board next to the USB 2.0 sockets and adding a new switcher next to the USB-C power connector. This “ended up costing us a three-month slip, as COVID-19 disrupted the supply of inductors from the Far East.”
See also: Mystery Hardware Found Attached to Server
