The Raspberry Pi Foundation has doubled the maximum amount of RAM available in the Raspberry Pi 4 to 8GB with a new device it’s selling for $75. To take advantage of the RAM increase, the foundation is also releasing a new 64-bit version of its operating system in early beta.
The new Raspberry Pi 4 is otherwise identical to the device that was announced in June last year, meaning it has the same ARM-based CPU, and HDMI, USB 3, and Ethernet ports.
Accordint to Raspberry Pi Blog “BCM2711 chip that we use on Raspberry Pi 4 can address up to 16GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM, so 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. And so, today, we’re delighted to announce the immediate availability of the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4, priced at just $75.”
To take full advantage of the increased amounts of RAM, the foundation is also releasing a 64-bit version of its Raspbian operating system in early beta, renamed to Raspberry Pi OS. The Linux-based operating system currently uses a 32-bit kernel, which means it can’t fully use 8GB of RAM. If you’d rather not run beta software, then there are other 64-bit OS’s available for the Pi 4 like Ubuntu and Gentoo.
