No Raspberry Pi 4 in 2019.

Brunnis

@Brunnis said in No Raspberry Pi 4 in 2019.:

Here's my optimistic but hopefully not entirely unrealistic guess:

SoC:

12/14/16 nm class SoC

Cortex-A73 (4 cores, ~1.6 GHz) -> 100-150 % performance improvement compared to Pi 3 B+

VideoCore V -> More than 100 % performance improvement compared to Pi 3 B+

RAM:

2GB LPDDR3

Interfaces:

HDMI 2.X (4K, 60 Hz)

2xUSB3

2xUSB2

Each USB port is a host port (i.e. no integrated hub)

Gigabit Ethernet (capable of 900 Mbps+) on its own interface (i.e. not attached to USB)

SD card: UHS-I 208 MHz (up to 104 MB/s)

Micro-USB power

Price:

35 USD

Form factor:

Same physical size. Similar or identical connector placement. Might even be compatible with most old cases.

Power consumption:

Approximately 500 mW per core. Similar to Pi 3B and ~30 % lower than Pi 3 B+.

So, it turns out I wasn't completely off with my guesswork! The CPU performance is in line with what I expected, but they chose to go with the A72 instead of the A73. The A72 and A73 perform very similarly, but the A73 is slightly more efficient.

We don't know much about the GPU right now, but I kind of doubt it's 2x the old one, like I had hoped.

Overall though, this looks like a truly great upgrade. The biggest "issue" I see with it is that they weren't able to go with a 16/14/12 nm class manufacturing process for the new chip. The first tests indicate even higher power consumption than the Pi 3B+. A more recent process node would have helped tremendously with that, but I'm guessing it would haven increased the price of the board.

quicksilver

@Brunnis What do you think of the different RAM options? Which one will you be getting? (if you are getting one...)

Brunnis

@quicksilver

I'll be getting the 2GB version. I just don't see the point in getting the 4GB version unless you're going to run desktop type workloads or know, specifically, that your workload is memory intensive. I have a hard time seeing how the emulators that you can run on this board will benefit from going with the 4GB model. But I could be wrong, of course. :D

Oh, and I just found this:

"The VideoCore 6 is about 4 times faster than the Video Core 4."

It's on page 22 in the PDF linked here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=243372#p1483956

Sounds very promising, but we'll see when more benchmarks start showing up.

Clyde

@Brunnis said in No Raspberry Pi 4 in 2019.:

I'll be getting the 2GB version. I just don't see the point in getting the 4GB version unless you're going to run desktop type workloads or know, specifically, that your workload is memory intensive.

More RAM is also useful for speeding up repeated hdd/ssd/sd access, since Linux uses unused RAM for buffering the file system. You can see this via the command free -h ("h" means "human readable" for more human-friendly numbers). Example from my Laptop:

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7,7G        2,2G        2,5G        405M        2,9G        4,8G

Although the "free" memory seems to be only 2.5 GB, temporary buffers take 2.9 GB. The real amount of free RAM is 4.8 GB, since the system clears the buffered data as soon as the memory is needed elsewhere. (Don't ask me why the numbers don't seem to add up perfectly, I don't know the actual math behind it.)