Raspberry Pi 4 announced and available - sounds like a pretty nice upgrade, Raspbian now based on Debian 10

Not something we usually cover here, but it's a fun bit of hardware news. The Raspberry Pi 4 is now official and it's out and ready to pick up.

Interestingly, they also overhauled their home-grown Raspbian Linux OS, as it's now based on Debian 10 Buster. To go along with this, their original graphics stack is being retired in favour of using the Mesa "V3D" driver developed by Eric Anholt at Broadcom. They say it has allowed them to remove "roughly half of the lines of closed-source code in the platform" which is a nice win.

Here's the breakdown of the hardware:

• A 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU (~3× performance)
• 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM
• Full-throughput Gigabit Ethernet
• Dual-band 802.11ac wireless networking
• Bluetooth 5.0
• Two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports
• Dual monitor support, at resolutions up to 4K
• VideoCore VI graphics, supporting OpenGL ES 3.x
• 4Kp60 hardware decode of HEVC video
• Complete compatibility with earlier Raspberry Pi products

You can see their quick announcement video below:

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The price still sounds great too, especially now with different RAM options (price may be slightly different in various shops stocking them):

• 1GB - $35/£34
• 2GB - $45/£44
• 4GB - $55/£54

For those who love to tinker, it really sounds like a great little unit. I've still never picked one up but I've always wanted one to play with. Sounds like my wait was worth it, might have to set one up as a little media centre of some sort. The additional performance should be quite interesting for gaming too, could also make a good streaming unit with the Steam Link App for Raspberry Pi.

You can read their full announcement here.