One of the most interesting hardware elements that we can choose to build a mini PC is to use a Raspberry Pi . This is a small board that offers us a huge range of possibilities, among other things thanks to all the operating systems it supports.
Over the years this is a device that has been evolving and improving, hence the different versions launched on the market. In addition, there are certain operating systems that have been adapted to the Raspberry Pi in order to get the most out of this hardware. In fact, in these same lines we are going to focus precisely on this software that serves as the basis for the rest of the applications that we will later install. We want to talk to you about all this because the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS is now available to everyone.
In order to benefit from all the advantages that this offers us, we only have to download it from its official website . But before taking this step, many users may wonder about the benefits and advantages of using a 64-bit system here. It is worth mentioning that the architecture of the software mentioned in its different versions to date was 32 bits. Of course, as you can imagine, the first change that we will see here is that we already have the possibility of running 64-bit Linux applications .
This will mean an important change in some cases related to both the functionality and the security of our favorite software on these platforms. But that is not all, but this migration will offer us other advantages that we will talk about next.
Why migrate to 64-bit architecture on Raspberry Pi OS
To the above we must also add that many program developers no longer release 32-bit versions . Therefore, by migrating to a 64 system we eliminate that annoying barrier that we sometimes find. In addition, to this fact we must add the benefits related to performance that we will find from now on. And it is that those who have a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 gigabytes of RAM, will now be able to allocate all the RAM to a single process . This was previously limited to 3 gigabytes per process on the 32-bit architecture.
Therefore, the elimination of this limitation can benefit us in certain modes of use that require a large amount of memory. With everything and with it and speaking of the rest of the models, it is to expect performance improvements due to the use of the ARM64 instruction set with the 64-bit SoC.
On the contrary, not everything was going to be advantages, since for example we find some applications that at the moment do not have a 64-bit version for Raspberry Pi OS . Likewise, we may encounter some problems if we use certain web browsers, such as with Chromium. Specifically in this case we will find ourselves with problems when it comes to playing streaming video content such as Netflix and other similar platforms.
Despite all this, in the event that we have the possibility of migrating to the new 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS, it is the best we can do for everything mentioned above.