Minimum 2x performance over previous gen(s) on every test with only ~1W extra power draw. That's seriously impressive!

they are better, modern, more efficient and cheaper CPUs in 2019

the fact that they decided to go with a 2015 inefficient one is kinda strange

>>they are better, modern, more efficient and cheaper CPUs in 2019

Name one?

They're possibly thinking about something like the Amlogic S922X. A 12nm SoC with Quad A73 and Dual A53, its definitely more modern and more efficient, though "better" is pretty subjective. As implemented in the Odroid N2 [0], its not cheaper at $79 with 4GB RAM, compared to Raspi 4's $55 (or $63 and $45 for 2GB, respectively). Hard to say if they cut the board down to remove all the things Raspi doesnt support and scaled up to Raspi scale if they could match the price. If not, it'd likely be close.

[0] https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-4gbyte-ram/

Non if you consider the need of developing open drivers for them

Modern SoCs cost more than $35.

Missing: SD card performance benchmark. Previous models could only read about 20 MB/s or so, while the modern SD cards can do 10x (maybe even more) that.

Is there any improvement in this? It's pretty important as RPi usually boots off it.

Found from the new docs:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

"The Pi4B has a dedicated SD card socket which suports 1.8V, DDR50 mode (at a peak bandwidth of 50 Megabytes / sec). In addition, a legacy SDIO interface is available on the GPIO pins."

In the video here https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/raspberry-pi-4-specs-bench... they said they doubled the SD card performance.

Finally! First RPi SD card performance upgrade ever.

Doubled, so I guess around 40 MB/s. Still a far cry from fastest SD cards that can both read and write over 250 MB/s. Hopefully RPi4+ will improve on this. :-)

People have spent however many years since the release of the last pi suggesting improvements. It's announced today offering basically everything that people were asking for, and you are already planning for the next one?

<captainpickardfacepalm.gif>

Huh? I'm not allowed to hope for future improvements?

I'm very happy for RPi4 SD improvements. Until now, RPi has had same lacking ~20 MB/s SD performance from the start. AFAIK, this is the first time ever there's been any hardware improvement in this regard.

I've had a microsdxc card with 90 MB/s reads and 80 MB/s writes since early 2014. Some current cards can read & write more than 250 MB/s, so there's still room for improvement.

As 95-99% of all RPis boot from (micro) SD and use it as primary storage, I'd say SD performance is a rather fundamental (often ignored) aspect of RPi performance.

"Huh? I'm not allowed to hope for future improvements"

Of course you can. My tongue was very much in cheek :)

...but still, it was announced today, savour the moment :P

You can boot off a USB drive.

IIRC bootloader and kernel have to be on SD card so you always boot from there but can easily pivot to the USB drive for the root partition.

Not any more! As of the Pi3 you can even netboot! https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...

Nope, it can boot from USB without SD card.

Correction: it seems like RPi4 doesn't boot from USB or Ethernet yet; they will release a firmware update to turn it on.

"Support for these additional bootmodes will be added in the future via optional bootloader updates. The current schedule is to release PXE boot first, then USB boot."

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberry...