8GB Pi 4 model B announced

The Raspberry Pi foundation announced the availability of the 8GB Pi 4 model B. They promptly all sold out. To quote part of their official blog post:

"The BCM2711 chip that we use on Raspberry Pi 4 can address up to 16GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM, so the real barrier to our offering a larger-memory variant was the lack of an 8GB LPDDR4 package. These didn’t exist (at least in a form that we could address) in 2019, but happily our partners at Micron stepped up earlier this year with a suitable part. And so, today, we’re delighted to announce the immediate availability of the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4, priced at just $75."

I would assume the price is in US dollars. It would certainly help when running Rosetta tasks where my 4GB Pi's don't have enough free memory to run 4 tasks at a time.

They also mentioned that they are looking at a Debian ARM64 operating system (sometimes referred to as aarch64). Debian already has an ARM64 build but it isn't customized for the Pi. Raspbian can be put into 64 bit mode but suffers because all the other apps and libraries are still 32 bit. We'll have to see how long before the 64 bit Debian becomes available. They didn't want to refer to it as Raspbian because that is the 32 bit operating system.

Onto cluster news now, and well, there isn't much to report. MarksRpiCluster is running the two Pi4 4GB nodes on Rosetta and another six Pi3;s are on Einstein. Speaking of Einstein they stopped their work splitter yesterday so the six Pi3's all ran out of work. This is the second time in a month they have run out of work. I have increased the BOINC cache a little in the hope of keeping enough work on each one so they can last a day.