Hungry makers have started tasting the new Raspberry Pi 4 earlier than expected, way before the 2020 scheduled release date. Also making news this week: inference benchmarks to advance the growing machine learning industry; Apple reportedly buying an autonomous vehicle startup; a new candidate for the role of “universal memory”; and a 2.5uW/MHz MCU promising to make batteries a neglectable item.

Raspberry Pi 4 is here

Raspberry Pi 4 is on sale from June 24, starting at $35. According to Eben Upton, Chief Executive of Raspberry Pi Trading, “this is a comprehensive upgrade, touching almost every element of the platform. For the first time we provide a PC-like level of performance for most users, while retaining the interfacing capabilities and hackability of the classic Raspberry Pi line.” Raspberry Pi 4 is built around the Broadcom chip BCM2711, a complete re-implementation of BCM283X on 28nm process. The power savings delivered by the smaller process geometry have allowed Broadcom to replace Cortex-A53 with the more powerful 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit Cortex-A72 core, yielding performance increases over Raspberry Pi 3B+ of between two and four times, depending on the benchmark. The process change has allowed to overhaul many other elements of the Raspberry design. The new board adopts a more modern memory technology, LPDDR4, tripling available bandwidth; the entire display pipeline has been upgraded, including video decode, 3D graphics and display output to support 4Kp60 (or two monitors at 4Kp30); and the non-multimedia I/O limitations of previous Raspberries have been addressed by adding on-board Gigabit Ethernet and PCI Express controllers. Other onboard features include dual-band 802.11ac wireless networking, Bluetooth 5.0, two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports. To support Raspberry Pi 4, the organization is shipping a new operating system based on the forthcoming Debian 10 Buster release.

Raspberry Pi 4. Image Credit: Raspberry Pi Trading