The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently announced the Raspberry Pi 4. The little, single-board computer has been an incredible development from the beginning, but the newest edition has now crossed what I believe to be an important threshold. For starters, the Raspberry Pi 4 now runs at 1.5 gigahertz instead of 1.4. This is nothing to sniff at, but other feature improvements such as more memory, the USB upgrade, and faster Ethernet are even more significant.

For example, the maximum memory available on previous versions was 1 GB, but 1 GB, 2 GB, and 4 GB configurations will be available. The Raspi 4 maintains the same form factor and its layout is quite similar, with four USB ports still available. Two of those are USB 3.0, thus increasing data input and output by a factor of 10. That improvement, along with the full-speed gigabit network connection, turns the little unit into a more than adequate core of a network-attached storage (NAS) system.

The graphics processor not only supports 4K output, it can drive two monitors through its two mini-HDMI ports. It supports one 4K monitor at 60 frames per second (FPS) and two and two at 40 FPS.

The basic price point of $35 still applies, but increased memory size will understandably increase the price to $55 for the 4 GB version.

Incredible!