I'm intrigued by the "faster, cooler" comment. Anyone know what that refers to? It looks like there aren't any vents on the visible surfaces, so I'm guessing there's been a hardware rev to make thermal throttling less of a problem?
If so, that might imply a pi 4 board release some time soon, which would be nice.
It's a new design of boad (not a Pi4 in a case) and has a large heat spreader inside, and the C0 2711 chip which has better clock gating so blocks can be turned off the save power. This means we can run at 1800 by default. It runs very cool.
The BCM2711 SoC inside is a newer stepping (C0 vs B0 in Pi 4 model B), and can run faster and slightly cooler than the older revision.
Thus the Pi 400 has a 1.8 GHz default clock, while the Pi 4 model B has a 1.5 GHz clock.
Note that I just checked my Compute Module 4, and it also has the C0 revision of the chip... so it's interesting the Pi Foundation chose to keep it at the default 1.5 GHz.
It might have to do with the fact that the Pi 400 has a massive keyboard-sized heatsink attached to the SoC in the unit!
Yeah, so I watched a teardown from one of the sibling comments. Looks like there are vents underneath, but no fan (which would have ruined it for me). Turns out it's got both a huge heat spreader and a newer version of the Broadcom SOC. That's really interesting, because it means they've got the bugs ironed out to be able to do a better pi 4 board which isn't so finicky about its enclosures. And that means I could potentially upgrade the pi 3 that's currently sat in my dusty workshop without caring about fans getting clogged. (yes, I know there are passively-cooled pi 4 cases about. They don't quite do it for me.)
If so, that might imply a pi 4 board release some time soon, which would be nice.