Raspberry Pi Supply Chain Issues Beginning To Ease Up

[jaxa]

A Raspberry Pi competitor using a CPU with an open-source ISA like RISC-V has always been my dream. I hope it gets enough attraction.

Buying that makes absolutely no sense. People expect top-notch community support and open hardware. RPi started as a 256 MB board. Now it has 8 GB. I'd expect the next iteration to come with 16 to 32 gigs of RAM. RPi just needs to strike first. There are rumors about a 32GB Orange Pi 5. RPi needs to launch it first. It needs faster IO. Again I'd expect 10 Gbps LAN. People need at least 10 Gbps LAN + WAN ports for routing internet traffics. Preferably a CM5 carrier board with a 4 or 8-port 10 Gbps programmable switch. Better DAC. USB4. A PCIe 5.0 4x slot.

Eben Upton whispered to me in a dream and told me that Pi5 is a quad-core Cortex-A75 with no NVMe. It will be much worse than the RK3588, but $100 cheaper and a reliable uplift over the Pi4. Community support can only take RPi so far, its GPUs are junk compared to the competition, with the RK3588 delivering something like 5-10x better performance than the RK3399 it replaced, and it's Mali.

There will be no RISC-V main series Pi, only Broadcom for you, forever. Maybe they will throw you a bone with a RISC-V Pico in the future.

Dream on about 32 GB of RAM. Maybe 12-16 GB. A nice and aggressive move would be if RPi replaces 8 GB with 12 or 16. So they would sell 2/4/16 for example, betting that the user who wants it for a server or heavy desktop usage will pay another $20-30 over the $75 price point to get even more RAM.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ra...sible-features

When asked about a potential Raspberry Pi 5, Upton said that his organization isn't working on one right now and is instead prioritizing making improvements to the Raspberry Pi 4 by doing things like updating software. He noted that, when it comes time for a Raspberry Pi 5, it would likely have updated specs such as a faster processor, the ability to have more than 8GB of RAM, quicker USB connectivity, more powerful Wi-Fi and 2.5 Gb Ethernet.

The logic is simple: the Pi is not a desktop PC replacement. I have experience with plenty of other ARM devices (I've built a robot using one, and my home server uses one), and, the creators of the Pi would surely take my side here. You're the one commenting about what it can or can't do based on criteria it never claimed to have.

RPi does market the Pi4 as "Your tiny, dual-display, desktop computer". Desktop usage is one of the main reasons they added another display connector.

The ODROID-H3+ would be a better choice as a desktop. That level of performance is likely sufficient, and it actually has hardware decoding that works, etc.

[mangeek]

I recall the RPI using an older process node than the typical Cortex-A72's 16nm. Would it have been possible for RPI to work with Broadcom to do a 'refresh' of the BCM2711 that was on a less congested manufacturing node, or is that a huge lift?

If they shrank the CPU core, could they put 8GB RAM in the package? Seems like that would cut down on parts... I'd have paid a premium for that, but I wasn't willing to pay scalper prices for the same metal.

[qarium]

Buying that makes absolutely no sense. People expect top-notch community support and open hardware. RPi started as a 256 MB board. Now it has 8 GB. I'd expect the next iteration to come with 16 to 32 gigs of RAM. RPi just needs to strike first. There are rumors about a 32GB Orange Pi 5. RPi needs to launch it first. It needs faster IO. Again I'd expect 10 Gbps LAN. People need at least 10 Gbps LAN + WAN ports for routing internet traffics. Preferably a CM5 carrier board with a 4 or 8-port 10 Gbps programmable switch. Better DAC. USB4. A PCIe 5.0 4x slot.

man... this one does have the 16gb ram you want. and it is also much faster than the pi4...

it looks like this chipset does have "top-notch community support"

[coder111]

As an aside, VisionFive 2 is starting to ship; there's some reports of people receiving them in the last few days.

This looks very interesting, thanks for bringing it to my attention. If that price remains as is, I'm likely to buy it next time I need a small factor PC to run Debian.

Any place where I can get cases for it? And does it have a headphone/audio out port? Looks like there's something marked "audio out".

[caligula]

https://shop.maker-store.de/5617/roc...gpu-up-to-5-ch

" Rock 5 Model B 16GB RK3588 Quad Core A76 2.4GHz + Quad Core A55 1.8GHz, Mali G610MP4 GPU (up to 5 ch"

Rock 5 ... Rockchip RK3588 looks much better and the price drops fast now at 301€

Buying that makes absolutely no sense. People expect top-notch community support and open hardware. RPi started as a 256 MB board. Now it has 8 GB. I'd expect the next iteration to come with 16 to 32 gigs of RAM. RPi just needs to strike first. There are rumors about a 32GB Orange Pi 5. RPi needs to launch it first. It needs faster IO. Again I'd expect 10 Gbps LAN. People need at least 10 Gbps LAN + WAN ports for routing internet traffics. Preferably a CM5 carrier board with a 4 or 8-port 10 Gbps programmable switch. Better DAC. USB4. A PCIe 5.0 4x slot.

[MastaG]

https://shop.maker-store.de/5617/roc...gpu-up-to-5-ch

" Rock 5 Model B 16GB RK3588 Quad Core A76 2.4GHz + Quad Core A55 1.8GHz, Mali G610MP4 GPU (up to 5 ch"

Rock 5 ... Rockchip RK3588 looks much better and the price drops fast now at 301€

More SBC's with the RK3588 are popping up.
But its Mali G610 is still no match for the Adreno GPU of a Snapdragon 8 Gen2.

[qarium]

https://shop.maker-store.de/5617/rock-5-model-b-16gb-rk3588-quad-core-a76-2.4ghz-quad-core-a55-1.8ghz-mali-g610mp4-gpu-up-to-5-ch

" Rock 5 Model B 16GB RK3588 Quad Core A76 2.4GHz + Quad Core A55 1.8GHz, Mali G610MP4 GPU (up to 5 ch"

Rock 5 ... Rockchip RK3588 looks much better and the price drops fast now at 301€

[ehansin]

This has been an interesting and informative thread, with just a splash of vitriol, without which would not feel like a proper Phoronix discussion

vegabook, interesting take on the lead-off thread post. All good food for thought. Good other insights from others here as well.

Why I wanted to post is that I really want to see lower-cost, lower-power, lower-resource usage computers become more prevalent. And they will. I'd like to see good enough for general purpose task computing that most people do. Might need a "good enough" GPU with open source drivers so that web browsers and videos work smooth enough. But point I am getting at is that computing has generated a lot of waste and in some ways we have inundated ourselves with this stuff.

As an alternative options to "all computers, all the time", I sometimes like to take a more minimalist approach. My latest messing around on higher-end five years ago laptop has been a Fedora 37 standard Workstation (i.e. Gnome) install so I could make sure I got the "infrastructure" installed as well without doing it piece by piece, and probably getting it wrong if I did! I then installed both Sway and Hikari (dang, turns out kind of cool once I get the hang of it!) as minimal Wayland compositors.

If these boards get to the point where they are just "powerful enough", I can build a really cool, minimal hardware desktop. Fanless (i.e. quiet), low-power, minimal waste, and unintrusive (how about them monster towers from the mid 1990s - nothing said "I'm a nerd!" like those suckers!!) Don't get me wrong, sometimes there is a place for max speed and performance, so not knocking that. We are getting to a point where good-enough hardware should be sufficient for many years and doesn't need to be "massively overblown" to provide good enough performance for the needs of a large portions of average computing needs out there. Economically approachable for me, and less wasteful.

Oh, and these low-cost boards allow kids and other people to get their hands on good learning platforms at an affordable price, and that is cool. I know that was the original intention of those involved, have read the story and made a lot of sense to me. Also touched on some cool history of educational computing in the UK.

[Alexmitter]

The problem is not the RPi "keeping ARM hostage". ARM doesn't give a %#&( about anything open source, and that's the main problem with the ARM ecosystem in general.

The RPi developer(s) and Broadcom have workarounded the ARM licensing by keeping the "trade secrets" of the design in the firmware, and opening what they can.

Please what, Broadcom SoCs are some of the most close source software dependent SoCs in the ARM ecosystem.
The A64 SoC for example has not just fully open source drivers, it also has FLOSS firmware running on the SoC managing things like Suspend.
There is nothing about a ARM SoC that inherently is a secret, ARMs own GPUs also all run with open drivers, Boadcom's in house GPU does not.

more modern RK chips only got 4.14 working

The RK3399 runs Mainline. You can Today, at this moment, use a RK3399 machine like the Pinebook Pro, and install Fedora or Debian from a USB stick like any old x86 system, no need for a custom kernel or other tricks.

[schmidtbag]

the analogy of the pipe wrench leaks like soggy paper cup (as is often the case in your posts, if I may venture). _For my use case_, namely coding mathematical algos, clearly stated in the post ("quant"), or exploratory devops (also clearly stated), the rpi has perfectly identical capabilities to the end deployment hardware, but with an order of magnitude or two less bandwidth and performance. It's not using a hammer for a wrench. It's a prototyping device.

Paper cups are a real thing and they can hold water just fine, so, your analogy is already worse than mine.
Note how I didn't mention anything about your dev work, because that's what the Pi is good for. My comment was about you thinking of it as a digital media detox, as if using it as a desktop PC was what it was meant for, hence my analogy.

But I know you like to argue for any ol' reason, with consistently sloppy logic, and all too often with minimal experience of the actual domain you are arguing about. The above won't be the first time, nor sadly, the last!

The logic is simple: the Pi is not a desktop PC replacement. I have experience with plenty of other ARM devices (I've built a robot using one, and my home server uses one), and, the creators of the Pi would surely take my side here. You're the one commenting about what it can or can't do based on criteria it never claimed to have.