Raspberry Pi 4 Announced With Dual HDMI, USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, V3D Driver Stack

[SpyroRyder]

TBH I would kill for proper UEFI support. It would be nice to be boot and install from USB natively.

[Jaxad0127]

The move to miniHDMI is a major mistake as well, old cases won't fit, and people need to replace cables in their setups.

Old cases won't fit anyways due to the move to USB-C and rearrangement of USB-A and ethernet ports. THis isn't the first time they've broken case compatibility.

[Zajec]

TBH I would kill for proper UEFI support. It would be nice to be boot and install from USB natively.

According to the https://libreelec.tv/2019/06/libreel...-alpha1-rpi4b/ :

The 4B now uses SPI flash for the bootloader. Current firmware supports SD card boot only – Network and USB booting are still on the Pi Foundation to-do list.

[Jabberwocky]

Looks like they have added many things people have been asking for. Assuming they used the original A72, it's ironic that they moved from Spectre immune CPU to one that is vulnerable. I hope they at least got a discount due to the Spectre vulnerable processors.

[johanb]

> 802.11ac

Are there open source drivers for wifi modules supporting 802.11ac now? If so, do they need microcode blobs?

[M@GOid]

The big benefit of the Pi ecosystem is the community, of course. That's worth the $35 on its own. And if $35 is overpriced for you, then you probably should be prioritising other areas of life than buying SBCs. I could have agreed that aspects of the previous Pis were crap - USB hub for ethernet, flaky power, slow CPUs - it appears this board has more than resolved these issues.

Indeed. People tend to forget how much those things cost before the Pi. If I could, I would send those people back to the eighties to buy a BBC Micro (the inspiration for the RPi) for £335 and talk about what is expensive and what is cheap.

[SpyroRyder]

According to the https://libreelec.tv/2019/06/libreel...-alpha1-rpi4b/ :

Well that's nice although it still doesn't say if that plan is full UEFI or just an extension of the current boot system. Either way I look forward to seeing such improvements on future boards

[Guest]

Looks like they have added many things people have been asking for. Assuming they used the original A72, it's ironic that they moved from Spectre immune CPU to one that is vulnerable. I hope they at least got a discount due to the Spectre vulnerable processors.

Considering that the price is still whopping $35 for the base model, users won't be the group that will benefit from such discount.

[danmcgrew]

@ #4:

"...Remember folks, the intended use for the RPi boards is education..."

I guess that's why this new improved, competitive version STILL does not have any form of proper, high-speed mass-storage; only the corruptible, slow SD card.
The corruptible SD card is due, of, course, to the Pi's having no shut-down procedure--a situation which has existed since the introduction of the very first Pi.
As one commenter said long ago, "Hey, this is for education purposes. If those little blockheads destroy the SD card by simply turning off the power supply, well...that's a learning experience."

Way to go, Upton, with all your REALLY important "improvements".

[L_A_G]

Well that's interesting... My main gripes with the older models included the lack of higher speed IO (they added USB3.0), the ethernet being wried in trough the USB 2.0 controller (it's now on-die connected by on-die PCIe), only having "small" CPU cores (they're now all "big" ones) and the somewhat lacking amount of RAM (they added 2 and 4GB options).

Obviously people are going to continue to find reasons to moan about it as they find reasons to moan about everything, but the way I see it this thing basically does away with pretty much all of the valid ones.

Everything is great except the MicroHDMI ports. Which engineer in their right mind would use such an abomination. Which engineer thought a 32-bit LPDDR4 could handle dual 4K displays to justify putting such an abomination on a board that is expected to sell in the millions.

First question: At that size dual full size HMDI connectors are out of the question. Second question: Considering the low power use cases these things are used for LP RAM was unavoidable.