Raspberry just announced a new version coming out:
8GB Raspberry Pi 4 on sale now at $75More interestingly, they also announced they are working on Raspian 64bit vesion, or rather Raspberry OS 64 Bit (just a rebranding, nothing changes).
But power users, who want to be able to map all 8GB into the address space of a single process, need a 64-bit userland. There are plenty of options already out there, including Ubuntu and Gentoo.
Not to be left out, today we’ve released an early beta of our own 64-bit operating system image. This contains the same set of applications and the same desktop environment that you’ll find in our regular 32-bit image, but built against the Debian arm64 port.
A first test here:
Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) Tested: Double the RAM, New 64-Bit OSThe one area where the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 really excelled was in copying extremely large files. When we ran IOzone, a synthetic test that measures reads and writes, with 4GB of data, the 8GB capacity crushed the 4GB model on read speeds, performing both random and sequential reads that were more than 20 times faster due to the larger Pi’s ability to cache the all the data.
So should you buy a Raspberry Pi 4 B (8GB)? If you currently own a 4GB model, there’s not a lot of reasons to upgrade right now, even if you use your Raspberry Pi as a full-fledged PC replacement. Even if you have a lot of tabs open and plenty of other apps running too, it’s difficult to use more than 4GB of RAM unless you’re running some kind of VM, giant database or RAM disk.
However, given that a fully-functional 64-bit operating system that promises to take advantage of the memory is on its way, the 8GB model is a good choice for folks who want to use their Pi as a desktop and don’t already have the 4GB capacity. For just $20 more, you are future-proofing your Pi for the next generation of software, and, other than the cost, there is no downside.
