Hello everyone, I am Xiao Yueyue. Today we are going to talk about the newly released Raspberry Pi 4.

Speaking of Raspberry Pi, it is a series of amazing small computers that can be used in any field your imagination can reach, such as smart home or robotic production lines. It has created the gold standard for single-board computers under the following of its fans.

Today, Raspberry Pi 4 has once again achieved new results, pushing itself to a higher peak, adding two HDMI output interfaces, and redefining the gold standard for single-board computers. From now on, no board without dual 4K output is qualified to compete with Raspberry Pi 4 at the same level.

Compared to its predecessor, Raspberry Pi 4 brings a higher specification processor, model BCM2711B0. Actually, you don’t need to care about its model name; manufacturers like FriendlyARM, Banana Pi, and Orange Pi in China cannot purchase this processor. The warehouse manager can record one less chip model, haha.

This RPI4 processor contains a quad-core 1.5GHz A72 core, dual HDMI 4K, two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0, true Gigabit Ethernet. It’s no longer afraid of impacting Raspberry Pi’s profits; it can now generously admit that the previous Raspberry Pi 3B+ was a fake Gigabit (sly British merchants). In the following text, the actual network speed of 3B+ will be revealed. Additionally, due to the upgrade to a quad-core A72, power consumption has increased, and the USB power input interface has also been upgraded to support 5V 3A USB Type-C.

Raspberry Pi 4 comes in three memory versions: 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB, and they are all particularly cheap. Are you all sharpening your knives and ready to buy?

Wait a minute!

Let’s first take a look at the comments from tomshardware. Firstly, the compatibility of Raspberry Pi 4 with operating systems and software is different from previous Raspberry Pi models. This means you cannot use the old Raspberry Pi series universal images anymore; you must download a new image for Raspberry Pi 4—Raspbian Buster.

Additionally, it should be noted that during testing, many Python libraries encountered compatibility issues in the new operating system. So, friends who only know Python but not C development should be careful.

For arcade game enthusiasts, there is also some not-so-good news. Raspberry Pi 4 currently does not support the Retropie system. Maybe advanced players can compile arcade emulators themselves, but for ordinary beginners, due to the lack of official support, this will be harder than climbing to the sky.

Of course, friends don’t need to be so depressed. After the bad news, Xiao Yueyue has good news to share.

This time, the processor has been upgraded to A72 cores, and compared to its predecessor, the computing power has undergone a revolutionary improvement. For example, from the single-core score in the Linpack benchmark test below (red bar), the difference between Raspberry Pi 2 and 3+ has never exceeded two times, but once it comes to Raspberry Pi 4, it suddenly exploded from 225 to 925, achieving at least a fourfold increase.

The memory specification of Raspberry Pi 3+ is very low, only DDR2. Raspberry Pi 4 has made the legendary curve overtaking and jumped over DDR3, directly upgrading to DDR4; the read and write speed has doubled compared to its predecessor.

Raspberry Pi 4 still does not have PCIe, does not support high-speed eMMC, nor does it support NVME SSDs. It only has a small TF card interface, and the read and write speed can be considered a joke. There is no need for everyone to spend a lot of money on a Samsung EVO Plus memory card with a read speed of 100 and a write speed of 60, because the TF card interface of Raspberry Pi 4 has a bottleneck.

As for the USB interface, due to the upgrade to USB 3.0, the improvement is significant. There has been a tenfold increase.

In terms of networking, Raspberry Pi 4 has finally reached Gigabit, with actual measurements reaching 943Mbps, surpassing all its siblings, including the 3B+, which claims to be Gigabit but actually only reaches 237Mbps. It’s not that Raspberry Pi 4 is too fast; it’s that 3B+ is too slow.

The WIFI speed of Raspberry Pi 4 is similar to that of its predecessor, the 3+.

Due to the upgrade to a quad-core A72, the power consumption of Raspberry Pi 4 has increased, but it is only about 20% higher than 3B+. Considering the CPU performance has increased by four times, the overall efficiency is still improved.

Without installing a heatsink, under room temperature conditions, the operating temperature of Raspberry Pi 4 can reach 74.5 degrees Celsius. During testing, Raspberry Pi once reached 80 degrees, at which point it throttled. For performance players, it is necessary to add a large heatsink to Raspberry Pi 4.

Raspberry Pi 4 can run AI inference, but it is just “able to run”. Do you still remember when Jetson Nano was first launched, it compared its performance with other single-board computers, and at that time Raspberry Pi 3 only achieved 1 frame per second running MobileNet SSD 300×300.

Although the CPU of Raspberry Pi 4 is faster, it is still slow for real-time AI inference. Fortunately, Google is about to launch a USB interface Edge-TPU module. Although the CPU of Raspberry Pi 4 runs MobileNet SSD very sluggishly, if an external USB AI computing module is used, the CPU requirements will not be as high as before.

Moreover, the CPU’s computing power is not enough to watch; even overclocking does not help. Even if Raspberry Pi 4 can be overclocked from 1.5GHz to 1.75GHz, such a small increase still results in a sluggish performance when running MobileNet SSD.

References

This article is translated by Xinpanzhang, unauthorized reproduction will be investigated! The original English link is as follows:

• https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4-b,6193.html

• https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-4-b-overclocking,6188.html

Image source: Internet

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