I've got something special here. The Raspberry Pi foundation have just released the Raspberry Pi 4 model B let's check it out!

This is the Raspberry Pi 4 model B, it has a whole lot of upgrades it's not just a little improvement, they've changed a lot of hardware on here, let's have a look at the things that matter the most. The form factor itself is the same as the model B so the holes are in the same place however there are some changes, it won't fit in the existing cases because the power connector and these two micro HDMI ports, (yes it has two HDMI ports) and on this side the ethernet connector is now over here on this side, instead of over here. They’re the big changes to the components that have been populated on this board, the rest of this though is much the same as the model 3B+ in terms of board layout and the actual size and dimensions.

Let's get straight to the CPU. This is a 1.5 gigahertz quad-core cortex A72, the most impressive part about the CPU is that it's a 28 nanometre technology, the predecessor, the 3B+ was using a 40 nanometre technology so the amount of power needed to perform anything has come down significantly. With that said it's using a bit more power, but we’ll cover off on that in a moment. The RAM is a big leap forward, we're now using 2400 megahertz LPDDR4 Ram and it comes in three variants 1GB, 2GB and 4GB, so that's a really big deal, that's almost a 2.5x in terms of bandwidth coming from the 900 megahertz Ram on the 3B+ to the 2400 megahertz on the new model and I really do look forward to see how this device gets used at home, in schools and commercial products because between this CPU and this new Ram, there's a lot to be done.

Moving to the outside of the board we have the USB-C power connector, that you need 15 watts to power this board and all its peripheries in its full capacity so USB-C helps make that possible we have two micro HDMI ports, that are 4k compatible, we have the camera CSI port, the same 4-pole connector for your composite video, your stereo output and over here we've got our 2 USB-2 connectors, 2 USB-3 connectors, true Gigabit Ethernet, this is for the POE hat which brings POE capability to the board, we have our standard 40 pin GPIO. From what I understand it's the same Wi-Fi chip that's used on the existing board, well at least it performs in a very similar way though interestingly on the boards that I have, there's no there's no Raspberry Pi logo etched onto the top and then there's the trusty DSI Display port.

So, the moment I got this, I set up this rig that you see here I've got my two Otii power analysis devices which read the power going into the boards. They both supply and analyse the power going in, I have my connectors going over to my shared keyboard and mouse and I've got my HDMI leads going through to the to the display. This is the Raspberry Pi 4, this is the 3B+ and they were running side by side through a bunch of tests rather than take you through each of those tests one by one here's a chart that I put together.

So, in this column I have the test that I performed with a quick note if there was anything unique about it. This column is the outcome for the Raspberry Pi 3B+ and this column is the outcome for the Raspberry Pi 4B, this column shows the change contextual to how well or poorly the Raspberry Pi 4B performed against the 3B+. So, the first test we'll look at is actually the boot time, interestingly the Pi 4 booted a little bit slower than the Pi 3B+, I would say that's to do with something going on at a hardware level, during my during my measurements I actually observed that there was a period of time at the beginning of the boot where not a lot was going on and then it triggered into the same pattern, like the energy usage as a 3B+, I would imagine that there's a chip or maybe a couple that require a little bit more initialization during that boot sequence.

Idle power, the 4 uses a fair amount more energy so if you were comparing this to the 3B+ it's -35% of the change, that's using more energy to perform the same idle outcome. The next test was peak power, this is the amount of energy being used while the CPU is fully loaded both devices performed about the same, the Pi 4 was a little bit better however it was performing 27% better at full load compared to the 3B+ when running the Sysbench primes benchmark. On a single thread the Pi 4 was about 21% better, here we've got a ram test for bandwidth using MBW, this is a massive improvement, the Pi 4 was running a 110% faster than the existing model.

To test the GPU I’ve used the videoGL32 package, the Pi 4 performed 15.9% better, here we have another big improvement so the ethernet port on the Pi 4 is performing at a genuine 1 gigabit connection so that's a 181% increase in reference to the existing model. Wi-Fi on both 2.4 and on 5 gigahertz was about the same, I would imagine that a similar technology is being used to achieve that and of course the Pi 4 now has USB-3 which means read and writing to things like this, a solid-state external hard drive, are going to be a lot better.

So, for both of those it's pretty much incomparable, you’re talking about a lift in performance of 300+% and 600+% for read/write. So, there you have it a side-by-side of the 3B+ and the new Raspberry Pi 4, I hope you got something out of this. That's a quick tour of the hardware on board and some of the benchmarks that compare the features of the new hardware if you have any questions let me know, likewise stay tuned for more Raspberry Pi goodness!