Raspberry Pi has launched a $75 version of its Raspberry Pi 4 mini PC with 8GB of RAM. This is a major advance for this little computer board and opens the door to more advanced games, emulation, and other software projects. Also being released at the same time is a beta version of the new 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS, another first for the Raspberry Pi, which has been limited to 32-bit since 2011. 32-bit OSs cannot allocate all 8GB of RAM to a single process, so this is a very important change

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This has not been a problem for the Raspberry Pi in the past, and a 32-bit OS was not necessarily a deal-breaker. As the company points out, alternative OSes like Ubuntu that can be installed on the Raspberry Pi have their own 64-bit versions, and only power users need to allocate all RAM to a single process. However, it remains a major step forward for the Raspberry Pi and its ability to handle heavier applications, and with the development of the Raspberry Pi's Vulkan driver, graphics capabilities continue to grow. [Eben Upton of Raspberry Pi wrote under the announcement post for the new 8GB model, "Vulkan news coming soon. This was last mentioned in January, so it has been in development for several months.

Vulkan driver support should be a boon for emulation on the Raspberry Pi 4 more than the added RAM and 64-bit OS. However, the RAM will make the Raspberry Pi 4 a more capable multitasking machine and pave the way for emulators that can only run on a 64-bit OS. Vulkan drivers are used in Windows, Linux, PCs, and mobile devices Add compatibility with universal open source drivers.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is still far from the power of the Intel NUC, but it is much smaller and a fraction of the price; with 8GB of RAM and a 64-bit OS, you can build your own high-performance mini-PC or simple home server for under $100.

Full specs for the Raspberry Pi 4 8GB are as follows: [11