You're most welcome. Glad you're enjoying it.

The main SoC is timing closed to 125C. The practical limit is probably the SDRAM, which you'd like to keep below 100C, but we've been running these things in ovens at 110C for quite long periods with no ill effects. Modern electronics are *really* robust.

Yeah, except no.

Gordon Hollingworth, our director of software engineering, has always kept the latest model of Pi on his kitchen counter with a small monitor, largely for surfing the web. Once he upgraded to a prototype Pi 4 during development, he noticed that he'd stopped taking his laptop out of its bag when he got home: his kitchen Pi had taken over the bits and pieces of light work he'd been doing.

We still need x86 in the office, for heavy stuff and because the VideoCore toolchain is x86 hosted, but we have a lot of people drifting across, even for development tasks, and not because we're telling them to.

Bingo. That was the design philosophy for Raspberry Pi 4. Nobody is saying it can replace a traditional PC for all users, or that it can match a PC in synthetic benchmarks, but for many users you can be significantly less powerful but be perceptually indistinguishable.

The browser use case is one of the main things we focused on improving with Raspberry Pi 4. More RAM for more tabs, and lots more "sprint" processing power for responsiveness when loading, scrolling or interacting with Javascript-heavy pages. We spent some time yesterday playing with the JetStream 1.1 browser benchmark on a pretty useable Windows 10 Atom x5 netbook that Gordon bought on Prime Day: stock Raspberry Pi 4 beats it by ~50% (a score of 42 versus 29). For comparison my "proper" laptop gets ~110, so there's plenty of scope to go faster, but this often doesn't translate into an improvement in perceived performance.

On a Pi 4?

Coming round to the idea we need a Model A version with the right hand side sawn off and PCIe in some form on the edge. Had written it off because you can't really get it below $30. Normally the $20-25 price point of Model A is driven by defeaturing the USB and Ethernet *and* halving the RAM, but there is no half-price 4Gbit LPDDR4 option. A $5 delta doesn't really set it apart from the Model B the way I'd like, but as a device for hacking PCIe it would be quite something.

Plus the PCIe port is actually also a SATA port (same PHY, different digits muxed internally). Might not have mentioned that. Or indeed tested it, but I'm sure it will be fine.

Actually those turned up too late in the day, and went through a separate testing program.

We actually grabbed a bunch of cheap(ish) chargers and cheap(ish) cables from Amazon, discarded the ones that were too terrible, and sent them out in various combinations. Because of course you worry about the vulnerability of your product to the cheap stuff everyone has, not to the expensive stuff some people have. Live and learn.

I think we'd be around, but our charitable work would be at a much smaller scale. Our estimate is that sales to hobbyists and (especially) industry make up well over half of the total.

I believe there were five on the station (two of ours, three we only recently found out about) until a couple of weeks ago. Now I think we're down to three (our two plus one other). Ours are used to run the Astro Pi program in partnership with ESA:

https://astro-pi.org/

Actually we can now play pretty much all the 8-bit 1080p30 content we can find, and a fair proportion of 10-bit content too. The GPU-accelerated HEVC implementation was a beast to get working, but it runs nicely now. Checkout Milhouse's Kodi 18 nightlies here:

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthre...

/me checks driveway hopefully for Ferrari

Any chance we could get our hands on a couple of your kiln-killed units? Be interesting to see what failed.

This is an interesting point. I clearly need to think about this some more.