(H.265) content, capable of decoding
4K60 content to boot, although all other
formats are limited to lower resolutions.
While the Pi 4 looks superficially similar
to its predecessors in terms of layout, there
have been considerable shifts. The top pair
of USB ports and the bottom Ethernet port
have now changed places, there are now
two micro-HDMI connectors in place of the
single full-sized HDMI port, and the micro-
USB power connector is now a USB Type-C
connector, boosting the board’s maximum
input current to 3A.
Rejoice! There are two USB 3 ports, although they
share a single PCI-E lane to the SoC
A switch to a USB Type-C connector lets the
RaspberryPi4 drawupto3AEven uncased, the Pi hits its thermal throttle point in
under five minutes of sustained activity
Under load, the Raspberry Pi 4
gets hot enough to hurtThePiHutacquires ModMyPi
Popular Raspberry Pi accessory and customisation outlet ModMyPi has been acquired
by rival The Pi Hut, with the promise that ModMyPi’s products will remain available under
the new ownership. ‘The entire ModMyPi range will be
available direct from The Pi Hut as soon as humanly
possible! Please bear with us, there’s a LOT of stuff to
move across,’ the company confirmed. ‘The Pi Hut team
will continue to manufacture and distribute ModMyPi’s
complete range of products, host the entirety of their web
content and offer the same range of services our
customers have grown to love.’N EWS I N BRI EF
SPEC
SoC Broadcom BCM2711B0 quad-core A72
(ARMv8-A) 64-bit @ 1.5GHz
GPU Broadcom VideoCore VI
Networking Dual-band 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi,
Gigabit Ethernet
Memory 1GB, 2GB or 4GB LPDDR4 SDRAM
Bluetooth Bluetooth 5, Bluetooth Low Energy
(BLE)
GPIO 40-pin GPIO header, populated
Storage Micro-SD
Ports 2 x micro-H DMI 2, 3.5mm analogue audio-
video jack, 2 x USB 2, 2 x USB 3, Gigabit Ethernet,
Camera Serial Interface (CSI), Display Serial
Interface (DSI)
Dimensions (mm) 88 x 58 x 19.5
Weight 46gEach port also now sits a little prouder of
the board, which means you’re unlikely
to squeeze a Pi 4 into an existing case
without considerable modification.
Surprisingly, though, for all project
co-founder Eben Upton warned of a clean-
slate plan following the last of the ‘legacy’
family, compatibility is good. Raspbian
‘Buster’, released alongside the board,
boots on any Raspberry Pi from the Pi 4
going all the way back to the original Model
B. The new board is also fully compatible
with add-ons adhering to the Hardware
Attached on Top (HAT) standard, and
accessories such as the Raspberry Pi
Touch-Screen Display and Raspberry Pi
Camera Module connect without difficulty.
The changes aren’t just tick-boxes on a
spec sheet either. Processor-wise, the Pi 4
is considerably faster than the Pi 3B+ across
a range of workloads. It’s around four times
faster in the LINPACK benchmark, twice
as fast at multi-threaded file compression
and around a third faster in a GIMP-driven
image editing challenge. The GPU provides a
solid boost too, pushing around 50 per cent
more frames per second in the OpenArena
first-person shooter as its predecessor.It gets interesting in workloads that were
previously fighting the USB bottleneck
though. The Ethernet throughput has
quadrupled from around 240Mb/sec to
943Mb/sec, while USB storage throughput
has risen by an order of magnitude from
33.24MB/sec read and 34.1MB/sec write- dropping if you’re transferring data over
the network at the same time – to 363MB/
sec read and 323MB/sec write. Even the
micro-SD storage enjoys a boost thanks
to the addition of DDR support, going from
23.5MB/sec read and 17.4MB/sec write to
45.7MB/sec read and 27.7MB/sec write.
There’s a cost, naturally – power and its
friend, heat. The Pi 4 runs hot, with thermal
imaging showing heat spreading throughout
the board. This heat comes from increased
power draw. When idle, the Pi 4 draws 3.4W,
compared to the Pi 3B+’s 2.9W, although this
figure may fall with post-launch firmware
optimisations, while under load it hits 7.6W.
It’s a small price to pay, although your
wallet will feel the difference in RAM
capacities. Pi 4 pricing sits at around
£33, £43, and £53 (inc VAT) for the 1GB,
2GB, and 4GB models respectively, from
resellers including pimoroni.com.