Raspberry Pi news
Launched out-of-cycle, the new Pi 4 comes packing a ticked wishlist to help please all of us, even Les!
There’s just one big new item this month: the Raspberry Pi 4 and its early launch.
Aren’t new Pis usually launched in February? But here we are in the middle of summer 2019 looking at the Pi 4 – and, over the page, there’s a full review from Les Pounder. The Pi Foundation had been pretty clear that there would be no new Pi 4 until 2020, but here we are. It turns out the all-new shiny BCM2835 SOC was up, running and validated far sooner than expected – a whole year sooner, in fact. Typically there would be four silicon revisions: A0, B0, C0 and C1, but B0 turned out production-ready.
With an all-new Arm Cortex-a72 processor with shiny new Videocore VI GPU, plus all the other new hardware, a new OS is required: Raspbian Buster, based on Debian 10 Buster. Oddly the Raspbian release actually occurred before the official Debian release on 7 July, there were reported issues with video playback and many programs failing to work. We suspect these issues will be ironed out by the time you read this, but why the rushed launch in the first place?
Part of these issues could be that all-new Videocore VI GPU that delivers a host of cutting-edge video capabilities to the new Pi. These include dual-display support at up to
4K resolutions at 60fps. Alongside this is hardware acceleration of the latest h.265/ HEVC video, again up to 4K at 60fps, plus accelerated encoding of 1080p h.264 video at 30fps.
Opengl ES 3.0 is also now supported on the GPU. Considering that all previous Pis had Videocore IV that only supported the 12-year-old Opengl ES 2.0 (equivalent to Opengl 2.0), the shift to the new Videocore VI and Opengl ES 3.0 was much needed. Even this is five years old, but at least it’s compatible with Opengl 4.3.
Find out more about Raspbian Buster at http://bit.ly/lxf253buster and about the Pi 4 at http://bit.ly/lxf253pi4. And, of course, check out our full review by merely turning the page…