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.
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“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
