The Raspberry Pi 4 gets a tiny CPU upgrade

An American developer has discovered that the popular single-board computer Raspberry Pi 4 (from US$68 on Amazon) does feature a new SoC with some tiny improvements over the previous chip. As of now, the silently upgraded processor has appeared on a newly bought unit of the 8GB variant of the model B, which means that tinkerers cannot directly order a Raspberry Pi 4 with the new chip.

But that is not even necessary. The now featured Broadcom chip on the Raspberry Pi 4 is the well-known SoC from the Raspberry Pi 400 and only brings some minor changes. The aforementioned developer noticed that when he replaced a defective Raspberry Pi 4 with a new one, the model number of one of the chips differed from the previous version. It now ends with the code "C0T", which is similar to the ending of the chip number of the Raspberry Pi 400.

In comparison to the older chip, there is no improvement in computing power, but only small changes in regard to the RAM management and power gating. Slightly more exciting is the presumption that the new processor may have more overclocking headroom and potential, since the same chip runs at 1.8GHz in the Raspberry Pi 400, while it is only clocked at 1.5GHz in the standard Raspberry Pi 4. But in the end, these small changes probably won't make any noticeable difference for the vast majority of use cases.