Little hint about RasPi 4

The last paragraph from an article about the new 3B+ offers a whiff of information about the future model 4 (translated from German):

It remains uncertain when a really new Raspi 4 materialize. Eben Upton, head of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, hinted in the conversation with c’t that it is planned for 2019. However, it was not decided from which manufacturer to obtain a new, modern SoC. One thing is yet certain: Even a much improved Raspi 4 should not be more expensive if possible.

Looks like several wheels will have to be reinvented when the time comes for RISC OS on RaspPi 4.

Looks like several wheels will have to be reinvented when the time comes for RISC OS on RaspPi 4.

Indeed. If they’re going with a different SoC family/manufacturer then it would essentially be a completely different hardware port (although if it’s from TI or Freescale then we may be able to re-use a lot of existing drivers)

However, it was not decided from which manufacturer to obtain a new, modern SoC.

So four ARMv8 cores and a decent GPU aren’t good enough?

If you ask me, I’d say it isn’t the core that needs attention, it’s the little peripherals (USB3, Ethernet PHY onboard and not via USB, SATA perhaps? etc).

If you ask me, I’d say it isn’t the core that needs attention, it’s the little peripherals

Those peripherals are all part of the SoC, and presumably upgrading them (or adding new ones like SATA) is a lot more involved than upgrading the ARM core. Especially when you consider that there are many peripherals which need adding/updating/replacing.

There’s also the memory map, in the past it’s been mentioned that upgrading beyond 1GB RAM would be difficult because they’d have to rearrange the SoC address map.